The Forgery of Venus

It is winter; there is little light left, and at four or so we stop and she wraps herself in the cloak again. She sits on the couch with her knees up like a little girl; the woman has no shame at all and yet is not degraded by it. We agree to meet tomorrow, but earlier this time, so as to catch the light.

But she does not come, instead sends a message that she was out late with the marqués, and I have to scurry to fill my day, uncanceling meetings and rushing about the city. I manage to arrange a final sitting with Cardinal Pamphili; his silly face is done and I can finish the rest here, his gown and the background and so on. But I am uneasy all the day and have the same unpleasant dreams, rooms full of strange light that shows the faces of people glowing like rotted corpses, yet no candle or fire to give it, and those people crying out in a language I don’t know.

She comes early, just after dawn, in the same black cloak, again naked beneath it.

“You must not think, Don Diego, that I travel through the city of Rome like this ordinarily,” she tells me, “but if I am dressed I must bring a woman along to undress me, and dress me again, my stays and laces and the rest-it is a disability of us women-and we wish to keep this painting our secret. Unless you would care to do that service?”

She sees my face and laughs. “I observe that it would not please you to serve me so. Therefore, let me take my pose.”

She does so and I paint. In the morning light her skin glows like pearl, and I brush in thin tints of lake mixed with flake white, always thin so that the white of the underpainting shows through, and plenty of calcite for transparency, tiny blended strokes so that the surface is perfectly smooth, as it would be to the hand’s touch. My fancy is that the light comes from within her, and I paint in the image in the glass, her face plain enough, and then I darken it and change it so that it could be any girl on the couch.

I work without stopping-I have lost count of the bells-until she complains of stiffness and the need to use the jakes. The figure is nearly done, and I say, a moment longer, I say, a few more strokes then, a little more modeling on the upper thigh, a bluish-gray, very thin. I put my brush down and gesture to her that she can move. She rises, groans, laughs, and with the cloak about her shoulders, she comes around and looks at the canvas.

“That arm is out of the drawing,” she says, “but I see why you did it, yes, the line of the back is made bolder, a desperate move, but it works. Look how thin the paint, the fabric shows through, what a miser you are! There is almost nothing there, but also everything, you compel the eye itself to make up the difference. Yes, my narrow waist, I am as proud as Satan of it, yet she is not much of a goddess, I think, but a mortal woman. I thank you for disguising my face, but you have my big culo to the life, and I believe some men would recognize me from that alone. Oh, Madonna, I am speaking like a whore again, I offend your Spanish sensibilities.”

She looks me in the face, smiling, showing her teeth like a peasant. She says, “I do it only because I hate you. This, seeing this work, makes me want to break my brushes. I would give my soul to be able to make flesh shine like that. Heliche will die when he sees it; it is just the kind of thing he likes. I imagine he will find some way of looking at it while he enjoys his new mistress.”

“Are you sure he has one?”

“Oh, yes, in that realm I am an expert, as you are as a painter.”

“And have you been fobbed off upon one of his train, as you foretold?”

“Indeed, I have,” she says.

“Who is it?” I ask, stupidly.

“Why, it is you, Velázquez,” she says. “Who else?”

She slips out of her cloak and comes to me, pressing her hot body against me, her mouth against my mouth, her tongue darting in like a little fish.

“And what do you think of love, Velázquez?” she says between kisses. “Do you think it is an art, like painting, or a mere craft that any churl or whore may accomplish well enough, or is it even less, a spasm of the flesh, akin to what the beasts do, that we inherit from the sin of Eve?”

I don’t know what to answer. I am dizzy. My knees shake. We fall upon the couch. She is upon me now, naked, her skin giving off a heat I can feel on my face, as from a brazier. She plucks at my clothes, her hands under my shirt, sliding down my body. I should try to break free, I know, but I have no strength in my hands or limbs.

“But let us suppose,” she continues, “that such an art exists, and that it is as far above the coupling of the mass of mankind as your art is above a painted sign hanging before an inn, or the music of the divine Palestrina above a street boy’s whistle. Do you think it possible? Let us now explore this interesting question.”

So was I taught about love, but I did not love the learning. Never before had I been imprisoned by my own flesh, and I found therein a harsh jailer, one who never slept, whose eye was always on me, whose hot goad was crueler than the instruments of the Holy Office, for they were used for the gaining of hell rather than heaven. What tricks she had of finger and mouth, and she gave me potions and salves so that I was as a boy of eighteen upon the couch-not that I ever did thus even as a boy of eighteen. She was like a cat in season, on me everywhere, in my studio, in my apartments, in hallways, in carriages, in the fields and amid the ruins of old Rome, in her house at Trastevere all night long. And still I had my duty to do, the buying, the shipping, the meetings with notables, my painting.

I painted her again, two more Venuses, as my lord of Heliche demanded, one standing in the pose of Medici’s Venus and another with Mars discovered by Vulcan. I aged ten years in that year.

In bed, in her passion, she called me Velázquez, and I told her no one calls me that and she must not either. She asked, then, “What do they call you in Spain?”

I answered, “They call me El Sevilliano, or Señor de Silva, or Don Diego.”

“Even your wife?”

“What my wife calls me is not for you to know,” I say, “but not Velázquez, at any rate. That is my name in painting.”

“I know,” she says, “and that is why I call you Velázquez in my bed, for were you not Velázquez you would not be there.” And starts her damned caresses again.

I think that she believed in nothing but painting, certainly not honor, nor station, nor the truths of our Holy Faith, or but a little. She treated me sometimes as a god for this reason, and other times as a slave. I was a slave with her, I admit, and a god too.

I will say she knew paintings. She would look at what I bought with a keen eye and inform me about what paintings were to come on the market, or which cardinal would part with some prize to curry favor with my king. I showed her once an Annibale Caracci I was thinking of buying, a Venus Adorned by Graces, and she laughed and said, “That is no Caracci. It is that wretched boy in Naples again, at his tricks. He is very good.”

“What boy?” I asked.

“Old Giordano’s son, Luca. The father is a nothing, a sign painter, but the boy is a prodigy, another Giotto perhaps, if he can stop his crimes to make a style for himself.”

“And why is this forger not brought to book?” I asked.

“Because he signs his work with his own name and paints it over. Look,” she says, and goes to my table and soaks a rag in turpentine. She rubs at a corner and there is a signature revealed. We both laugh at that. I think I have not laughed so much in my life as when I was with her. And we fought too.

Once she took me to Santa Maria in Trastevere to the porch of the basilica where the cripples gather, the deformed and the naturals, to seek alms, and she asked me if I wanted to paint these as I had painted the royal dwarfs and fools.

“Why should I?” I answered. “Those I painted because they were in the king’s service and part of his household. I painted his dogs too.”

This answer I saw did not please her, and she asked me, “Does the king love you?”

And I replied, “Assuredly he does, for he gives me honor and appoints me to noble posts in his house.”

She said, “Well might he honor you, for you do him honor with your brush and paint the magnificence of his daughters so they may be married off to kings and emperors. But does he love you as Velázquez, as I love you? Or are you a sport of nature, as are these miserable ones? The infantas of Spain have dwarfs around them so that their beauty is magnified by comparison, and so the king has the greatest painter in Europe by him, to magnify his own glory. It is all they care about, the kings of the earth.”

“The king loves me,” I said again. “He has said he will make me a knight of Santiago when I return.”

I had not meant to say this, for to boast to a woman of such things is not my way, but she vexed me, and I thought about how I had spoken with Rubens on the same subject and how he had slighted my king.

“Ribbons are cheap,” she said. “It is like giving a sweetmeat to a fool or a scrap to a dog.”

I grew angry then, for she was not Rubens, and I said, “You know nothing of such matters, you, the daughter of a merchant and a stranger to honor.”

“Am I so?” she said in a loud voice, so that the crowd turned and stared. “Do you think that? Yes, my mother married a merchant to keep from starving, but she descended from the Colonnas and before that from the Aurelii. We were great in Rome when Madrid was a mud village. And what of your blood, Sr. Sevilliano, you from a city swarming with half-Jews and quasi-Moors and every sort of mongrel cur!”

And she strode away back to her house and I was laughed at in the street.

We fought like that many times. She had no idea of how a woman should behave. Many times I stayed away and many times she did too, but always her witchcraft drew me back, this madness, destroying all honor and duty as an oiled rag wipes through the paint and makes all dull mud.

I painted her once more, toward the end of my stay in Rome. The king had commanded me back to Spain, each letter more importunate, and yet I could not leave. She was with child, she said, mine, and I believed her. Her husband barred her from his house and cut her off entirely, and she took a mean apartment near the river by the Pope’s bridge. I said I would acknowledge the child and see it bred, but this did not seem to please her as it should. She knew I was going; of course I was going! What did she imagine, that I would stay with her there or drag a concubine back to the Alcázar? She drank. She had always drunk deeply of wine, but now she began to take brandy and Holland spirits. It made her madder and even more abandoned in lust. And dragged me down with her.

So, upon an afternoon in spring, we had exhausted ourselves upon the couch in my studio, and as it happened that same mirror was propped up upon a high chest, and as we lay there our reflections shone out from the dusty glass and she said, “That would be a painting, Velázquez, a Venus as the world has not yet seen her, fucked into insensibility by her Adonis. But you would never do a thing like that. Your Holy Office and your Spanish court would never approve. Or no, I believe that such a painting is beyond even your art, to capture us as we are now and perhaps will never be again. No, not even you.”

“I can paint anything,” I said, “even this.”

“Then do it! There are the paints, here am I. You can paint our little kitchen-boy Cupid in later.”

I got up from the couch and placed a primed canvas on my easel and painted her as she was. I worked all afternoon, and when the figure was done I turned it to the wall and would not let her look, though she snarled at me like a vixen. Later I found the boy we’d used in the first painting, the one of her back, and painted him in, and then the rest, the draperies and so on, and when I was done I hid it in my closet where I keep my funds and my accounts and where no one goes but me.

I showed it to her later, the last time we were together. I was packed, with my casts and paintings all sent ahead; we were to leave for the ship at Genoa within the week.

She laughed like a crow when she saw it. “Oh, Velázquez, we would burn for this if anyone saw it, you and I, our smokes would mingle above the Campo dei Fiori; it is the worst thing ever painted. Give it to the Pope as a parting gift, I beg you, and let us die together.”

“No one burns for a painting anymore,” I said.

“You are quite right, nor have I taught you wit in all these long months or to know when I speak in jest. But, my love, it is still enough to ruin you. Whatever possessed you to put your face and my face in it?”

“I was drunk,” I said.

“That will not do when they drag you before the Inquisition. There are only two things to be done with it. You can sell it to Heliche. He will value it and keep it close.”

“I do not sell paintings,” I said. “I am not in trade.”

“Oh, pardon me, Don Diego de Silva y Velázquez, I had forgotten,” she said, “but in that case a brushload of flake white will do.”

“I had thought you could take it. I had planned to give it to you.”

“Oh, did you!” she cried. “What generosity! So that in my misery I could be daily reminded of the great passion of my whole life? Velázquez, my dear love, you are an ass. I will paint it over this minute. I will paint over it and paint something else on top of it, a religious subject in the Venetian manner, and give it to a church. Then may God forgive me.”

So I left her and returned to my apartments, and I was busy with my leaving and thought of her not at all. Until that night, in my bed, when I considered that never again would she share it, nor would I ever again experience those pleasures she knew how to draw from me. Then I felt bereft and sleep would not come, and I called for hot wine and so achieved the oblivion I sought.

And awoke in terror of the light that shone from a glass with no flame and the noises from the street outside and sounds from a small box as if a demon were captive inside, and my first thought was, I have died in the night and I have awakened in hell, this is my punishment. A sound of roaring, like a torrent, and a gurgling noise from a room nearby, and then to my extreme horror through the door walked a naked woman I had never seen before, and I screamed and slid from the bed and crouched in a corner, covering myself and crying prayers, begging forgiveness. And the woman came closer with a look of consternation on her face, trying to embrace me and speaking a language like the Romans speak, but I could not make out one word in five. When she saw I would not be tempted into lust she wrapped herself in a robe and left, and I pulled the blanket over my head and wept for my damnation.

So this must be like trying to describe sex to a child or religious exaltation to an atheist; it’s something you have to experience to know about. I was having those thoughts and feelings, Velázquez in torment, and at the same time, like a carrot in a boiling stewpot, there floated into my consciousness bit by bit the pattern of memories and learned behaviors that constituted the personality of Charles Wilmot, Jr. That’s not a box of demons, that’s a clock radio playing. Those noises are early automobile traffic through the piazza. That’s a lightbulb.

Then the enormity of what had just happened to me struck me in the vitals. I was lucky I now recalled where the bathroom was and what it was for, because I barely reached the toilet in time. They found me that way, all retched out and shivering, and Franco got me into the shower and cleaned off and Sophia put me to bed and stayed, trying to find out what was wrong with me, and the odd thing now was she was speaking Roman dialect and expecting me to understand, and finally I asked her to speak English and, with a puzzled look on her face, she switched languages.

She wanted to know what was up with me, naturally, and I made something up. I said that something must have gone wrong with my brain during the night, maybe a tiny stroke, because when I woke up I didn’t know who I was or where I was. And there was something wrong with my memory, some kind of amnesia.

This alarmed her. She squeezed my hand and put her other hand to the hollow of her throat. “Yes, but you remember us.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “My last memory is us going to that little bar and talking with your friends and me drawing a bunch of people.”

“Chaz! That first time at Guido’s was months ago! How could you not remember?”

“What’s the date, Sophia? Today’s date.”

“It’s the third of March.”

“Okay, then everything from mid-December onward is a complete blank.”

“But, you will see doctors…it will come back, yes?”

“It could,” I said, carefully, not believing it at all. “You could help me if you sort of told me what I was like, what I’ve been like, how we got together and all, what I’ve been doing.”

It took some prodding, because amnesia is so terribly threatening. Our lives are constructed so much of shared memories that we tend to panic when our partners in these refuse to confirm our own. But in a little while, when she saw I wasn’t going to suddenly remember, she began to tell me her tale. She’d started to pose the day after we’d gone out to Guido’s. It was pleasant enough. We’d talked as I worked, just chat at first, but later I’d told her something about my life and she’d told me something about hers, her family, her lovers, her ambitions for herself and the boy. We worked in the morning and then had lunch with the ménage. She related anecdotes: Baldassare and his liver, and the home remedies he’d marshaled in its support; about Franco and his vanity and his women and his dark past; about little Enrico and his teachers and friends. A domestic life in all its Italianate richness. It had apparently been a happy time.

And I’d told her about my family in the States, how I was still more or less carrying a torch for my wife. She knew it was a long shot, but she’d liked me. She thought I was gentle, a decent man, a genius with paint. She admired me. She didn’t care that I was hung up on another woman. Any man worth having had other women in his life, but I was here now and she had a feeling for me, one she hadn’t felt in a long time. And so it happened. One day, when the light had gone, she’d risen naked from the couch and embraced me, and I was hesitant, like a young girl, which she found charming, but in the end I’d fallen back on the couch with her, and we’d made love and it was wonderful. And so on, for the next months, and she liked how I was with Enrico, he’d opened up so much, was always asking if Chaz was to be his new babbo.

At that point she was crying, searching my face for some sign that I’d shared this life, but there was none. I mean, I wasn’t being callous, there was just nothing there-she was a nice woman with whom I’d had one date, and so I steered the conversation as gently as I could to the painting.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “you did your painting. You don’t remember that either?”

“No. But I’d like to see it now. Maybe it would snap me back or something.”

“It’s not here,” she said. “Baldassare has taken it to the laboratory on Via Portina, an industrial area, you understand? He needs high vacuums and ovens, special equipments for this work, the aging.”

“What’s the painting like?”

“What is it like? It is like Velázquez. It is Velázquez, the most astonishing thing I have ever seen. Baldassare says it is a miracle.”

And she told me what I had painted, and I recalled it well, having just finished it a few weeks ago in subjective time, in Rome, in 1650. Painting’s not just in the eye and the head, it’s in the body too, like a dance-the hand, the arm, the back, the way you lean forward and sideways to check out a passage, the standing away and moving close. So when you look at something you’ve done, you have all the intimate body memory, and in this case I had a whole other set of memories, the feel and scent of this particular woman’s skin, the density of Leonora’s living flesh in my hand and under me and on top of me, the squirming damp reality of it. And more than that-this is even harder to explain or even to think about-I had the sense memories of somebody else, somebody else doing the painting. The brain fucks with your head, but the body never lies, or so I’d thought.

For the next week I was a complete wreck, afraid to go to sleep, afraid I might wake up again not me. I spent most of these first days after my return wandering along the river, up to Castel Sant’Angelo and down to Ponte Testaccio, exhausting myself, drinking in a bar before returning home. Most of me was still in 1650: I could recall dozens, hundreds of details, more than I could recollect of the last year of my so-called real life. Maybe the seventeenth century made for a denser, more vivid existence: I mean street scenes, talking to cardinals, servants, what I ate at banquets, the talk at diplomatic receptions, being with Leonora.

Yeah, her. My body, my mind, my heart, if you want to call it that, was burdened with a relationship that I never had, with a woman who died over three hundred years ago. So what was the real story? Obviously, an unprecedented reaction to salvinorin, combined with amnesia, also drug related. My brain was damaged, we already knew that, and since the only deep emotional attachment I’ve ever had was to Lotte, somehow I conflated all that with thinking about Velázquez and came up with this imagined life, and there you had it, an explanation that Shelly Zubkoff would swallow without gagging.

Another reason for staying out of the house was that Sophia started crying nearly every time she looked at me, and it freaked me out, because she’d had a love affair with a ghost, a demon lover, while I’d been making love to Leonora three centuries ago.

One day she wasn’t there and her mother told me she’d gone with the kid to visit friends in Bologna. The signora had been crying too, I could see, and through the barrier of language she let me know that I had been a complete shitbag.

You have to understand that part of the problem here was my complete isolation. I’d checked my cell phone after coming out of the past and learned that there were no messages at all on it. Not one. Jackie Moreau was dead; Mark was, well, Mark, not a sympathetic ear; Charlie was God knew where in Africa, and Lotte was incommunicado. It was like I’d been jailed by the secret police.

So I called my ex-wife one evening, and as soon as she heard my voice she said, “The only thing I want to hear from you is that you’re getting psychiatric help.”

I said, “Hey, I’m planning to, honestly, but look-I’ve, um, been painting like mad and Krebs is coming tomorrow to check out the work and if he likes it, that’s a million bucks to me. Lotte, imagine what we’re going to do with-”

But she wouldn’t listen. She said, “You know, it makes no sense to talk to a maniac, and it hurts me to hear you rave like this. Call me when you are getting the medical help you need.”

And she hung up. Isolation complete, then. Yes, good thing I didn’t tell her about what I’d been doing, or imagining I was doing, for the last three months. She might’ve really been annoyed. So, okay, I was crazy, but you know, just then I didn’t feel crazy. I mean, I was functional as an artist, because apparently I had pulled off this huge coup of a forgery. I felt crazy in New York, but now I didn’t. And frankly I was dazzled by the money and the promise of more. It’s the rule that if you’re rich enough you can’t be that crazy. So I really looked forward to Krebs coming for that reason, and also because, now that I thought about it, he was my only remaining friend.

Now came the big day. That morning Baldassare went out and brought my picture back from the secret forgery lab. He set it up on a display easel in the parlor, covered with a black velvet cloth, and he was guarding it like a dragon, wouldn’t let anyone have a peek before Krebs arrived. Franco drove to the airport to meet him, and while he did that I got fed up with the tension in the house and went out to take a long walk, east to the Tiber and along the Ripa and back through the Porta Portese in the ruins of the old walls. It wasn’t quite warm yet but spring was happening in Rome; you could smell the river and the trees on the boulevards were greening up and blossoming, if they were that kind of tree.

When I returned to the house on Santini I saw that the Mercedes was already parked outside and I hurried in. Krebs was there, in the parlor, with Franco and Baldassare and a man I didn’t recognize, a small, stout, olive-skinned guy with dark-rimmed glasses and the air of an academic. They were all standing around drinking Prosecco, and I saw that the drape was still on the painting.

Krebs hailed me as I came in, embraced me warmly, and said that he’d insisted they wait until I came back for the unveiling. He introduced the stranger as Dr. Vicencio de Salinas, a curator from the Palacio de Livia, the private collection of the duchess of Alba, which kind of puzzled me at the time, because I thought, Hey, isn’t this a little premature, showing the thing to an expert before the boss even had a look?

Then Baldassare pulled the drape off with a flourish and there were gasps all around. All three of us-Krebs, Salinas, and me-surged forward to look at it more closely and bumped shoulders, and I kind of pulled back and let them get the best look. They were the customers. But I’d seen enough to understand that Baldassare had worked a wonder. Oil paint takes years to really cure up and dry, and it changes its appearance during that time; even the things I’d done as a kid still looked like the contemporary objects they in fact were. But this son of a bitch looked old, and it had the palpable authority that old things have. It looked cracked and heavy with age, like every painting from the seventeenth century you see in museums, and I had a brief moment of temporal vertigo, as if I’d painted it in the seventeenth century for real.

The Spaniard inspected the painting at various distances for what seemed a long time. At last he turned to Krebs with a small smile, nodding his head-reluctantly, it seemed to me.

“Well? You said it couldn’t be done,” said Krebs. “What do you think now?”

Salinas shrugged and answered, “Frankly, I admit to being astounded. The brushwork, the colors, that glow on the skin are all entirely true to the Rokeby Venus. And the…the preparation is also very fine; the craqueleur seems flawless on initial inspection.”

Krebs clapped Baldassare heartily on the back. “Yes! Bravo Signor Baldassare!”

And Salinas went on, “Subject, as I say, to technical examination, the pigments and so forth, I would have no trouble in passing this as genuine.”

I stood there amid the smiles, and no one looked at me or patted me on the back, and I figured it was something like what went down with Castelli’s faked Tiepolo-they were practicing pretending that it was real. I couldn’t study it closely myself. When I tried to a pain started across my eyes and my vision blurred a little and I had to sit down.

I looked up at Krebs again and he was talking with Salinas, something about the exact dimensions of the painting, and Krebs assured him that it was right to a tenth of a millimeter and told him to get on with taking his samples, because he had to get back to Madrid as soon as possible so as not to be missed at the museum.

Salinas opened a briefcase from which he removed a set of binocular goggles, a high-intensity headlamp, and a small black container about the size of an eyeglass case. He put on the goggles and the lamp, switched it on, turning himself into something like ET on a spelunking expedition. He approached the painting and from his little case drew a shiny small tool.

“He’s taking a core to analyze the paint layers,” Krebs said. “Tiny, and virtually invisible. He’ll check the pigments and the ground for age and anachronism. Which of course he will not find.”

“I hope not. What was all that about exact dimensions?”

“Well, obviously whatever connoisseurship and technical analysis may say, the thing is worthless without an impeccable provenance. Now, with a drawing, or some minor Corot, or even a Rubens, this is easily handled, as I’m sure you know. It’s nothing to prepare a seventeenth-century bill of sale-old Baldassare can do it in his sleep-and there are thousands of dusty garrets in Europe and ancient families who will attest, for a consideration, that their ancestor the count bought the thing in sixteen whatever. But for something like this, such dodges will not do, not at all.”

Salinas seemed to be finished at the painting. He switched off his lamp, removed his goggles, and held up a small vial as if it were the cure for cancer.

“I have it,” he said, and placed the vial into his little box.

“Excellent,” said Krebs. “Franco will drive you to the Ciampino airport; the jet you came on is fueled and waiting and you should be back at your desk in Madrid”-he checked his wristwatch-“no more than four hours after you left. A long siesta, but not unknown in Madrid, I believe.”

Salinas smiled and shook hands with both of us, with the usual assurances of goodwill, not entirely hiding what I saw, close up now, was extreme terror; he packed up his things and departed in something of a rush. I heard the Mercedes start up outside.

“A useful little man, that,” said Krebs reflectively as the sounds of the car receded. “And a bitter man: well trained, but without the flair needed in a museum director nowadays. He was passed over for promotion as director of collections, and this is his revenge. And his prosperous retirement.”

“He’s going to buy the painting for the Livia?”

Krebs gave me an unbelieving look and laughed. “Of course not. His job is to give us a flawless provenance.”

“How?”

“That you will see with your own eyes, perhaps as soon as next week, when we go to Madrid.”

“We?”

“Yes, of course.” He looked at his watch again. “You know, it’s past one. Aren’t you famished? I am.”

With that we left the house and walked down the street and across the Piazza San Cosimato to a little restaurant where they apparently knew Krebs and were very glad to see him. They gave us a table by the window, and when we were settled with a plate of dried anchovies and one of whitebait fritters, and a bottle of Krug, he said, “Wilmot, I realize you are an artist and thus not entirely of this world, but I must press upon you that from now until however long it takes you must keep yourself under almost military discipline. No wandering off and no unauthorized calls. When we return I will ask you to surrender your cellular phone. It’s not me who makes these rules.”

“Who does then?”

“Our friends. My partners in this venture.”

“You mean you’re mobbed up?” I said, or rather the wine said.

“Excuse me?”

“Mobbed up. You’re working for the Mafia.”

He seemed to find this amusing, and while he was chuckling the waiter came and we ordered food. The waiter said the scampi Casino di Venezia was very good and Krebs said we had to have it in honor of the city where we began our association, so I said, okay, I’ll have that too, and he ordered a bottle of Procanico to go with it. When the man had gone he continued, “Mobbed up-I must remember that expression. But let us not confuse things. The Mafia is about whores and drugs and corrupt contracts for poured concrete. We are talking about an entirely different level of enterprise.”

“Criminal enterprise. Whatever happened to letting the experts come to their own conclusions? Whatever happened to Giordano Luca? You’re planning a major fraud.”

He looked at me with what seemed like amused pity. “Ah, Wilmot, did you ever actually think it would be anything else? Really?”

And I had to admit to myself that he was right. I do have a habit of believing my own lies. I took a breath, drank some more wine, and asked, “So when do I get my money? Or was that another thing, like those crummy sketches you raved about, that I should have realized was too good to be true?”

“Good God, do you think I intend to cheat you?” he said, with what seemed to be genuine amazement. “That’s the last thing in the world I would ever do. Wilmot, I have been searching most of my life for someone like you, someone with your incredible facility with the styles of the past. You are, to my present knowledge, unique in the world. I would have to be insane to treat you with anything but the greatest respect.”

“That’s terrific, but on the other hand I have to ask you if I can make a phone call.”

“I told you, I don’t make those rules. But when the operation is complete, and the surveillance is lifted, you may call anyone you like. Always being discreet, of course. Because, you understand me, there is no-how shall I put it?-statutes of limitations on art forgery. That is, until the actual witnesses are deceased, the authenticity of the painting is always at risk. With one careless word an object worth many tens, hundreds, of millions becomes a mere pastiche and worth nothing, and then the buyers look to get their money back. They go to the dealer and of course he talks, and then the cord that holds it all together unravels. Then it is either prison for all of us or a worse fate, if in any way the gentlemen I referred to earlier are in the least implicated. Not a happy prospect. Especially not for you. Or for your family.”

When he said that I almost lost a mouthful of whitebait, but I managed to get it down and asked him, “What’re you talking about? My family?”

“Well, only as a means of controlling you. While you remain alive.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, well, I speak loosely of witnesses, but in affairs like this one, there is only one witness who counts. I mean, Baldassare knows, and Franco, and that girl who posed, but no one cares about them. Anyone can cry forgery and the interests that wish for the painting to be original can always shout them down. It happens all the time. But one witness can never be shouted down.” He paused and inclined his head toward me and snapped a bit of fish from his fork.

“The forger himself,” I said.

“Just so. Now don’t be downhearted, Wilmot, I beg you. As I keep saying, this is a new life you are in now. Danger, yes, but when has real art not been associated with a certain danger? Quattrocento Florence was a violent place, and art’s greatest patrons have always been violent men.”

“Like the Nazis?” A little dig there, but he didn’t blink.

“I was thinking of the robber barons of America or the aristocrats of Europe. And the artists themselves have always been freebooters, living on the edges of society. When art becomes domesticated into a branch of show business, it becomes flaccid and dull, as now.”

“Sorry, but that’s nonsense, like Harry Lime’s remark about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man. Velázquez had a steady job-”

“Yes, and in his lifetime he did fewer than one hundred fifty paintings. Rembrandt, living on the edge of life, did over five hundred.”

“And Vermeer, who was even more on the edge, did forty. I’m sorry, it won’t wash, Krebs. You can’t generalize about what kind of temperament and what social conditions produce great painting. It’s a mystery.”

I could see he was starting to get a little steamed to have his pet theories exploded like this, but it’s always gotten me steamed to hear theories about how art happens dumped on my head by people who never handled a brush. But then he shrugged, and smiled, and said, “Well, perhaps you’re right. It is a life I am used to, and we all tell ourselves stories to justify ourselves to ourselves and others, because we wish to have some company in these little scenarios. But I see it is not to be, you have a head as hard as mine. And really, it does not matter in the least, as long as you do not forget that the sword that hangs over us is harder than both our heads. Ah, good, here is our meal.”

The food was excellent, but I had acid on my tongue and could hardly taste it. I drank more than my share of the wine, however, and got enough of a buzz to keep me in my seat instead of running out of the place screaming hysterically. Krebs chewed away on his scampi and I wondered how he’d ever gotten used to this kind of life. I mean, he seemed like an ordinary guy, no more ruthless-in fact, maybe less ruthless-than the typical high-end New York gallery magnate.

I wanted to jab him some more, though, so I said, “Is it true, by the way, that you got your start selling pictures stolen from murdered Jews?”

“Yes,” he said blandly, “perfectly true. But as I’m sure you know, there was no question of returning these things to the rightful owners. It would be like trying to return a carving to an Assyrian or an Aztec. They were dead. I sincerely wish they hadn’t died, but I didn’t kill them. I was thirteen when the war ended. So what was I supposed to do, leave them in a Swiss vault forever?”

“An interesting moral point.”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you another one, as long as you’ve brought up the subject. My father was a Nazi and I was raised as a Nazi. Everyone of my generation was. As a boy I could not wait to be old enough to join the forces and fight for the Reich. I believed every lie they told me, as I imagine you believed the lies your country told you. Tell me, were you in Vietnam?”

“No, I was exempt. I had a kid.”

“Lucky you. According to the Vietnamese your country killed three million of their people, most of them civilians. I’m not excusing what the Nazis did, of course, just pointing out that Germany is not alone in slaughtering innocents, and for a long time the Americans supported that war. Now I will tell you an amusing story. In December of 1944 my whole family was back in Munich and the city was being bombed day and night. My father was naturally concerned for the safety of his family, and so he pulled strings and got us out of there, to a place that had never been bombed and which was considered quite safe. Do you know where this was? It was Dresden. We were there in February when the Allies burnt the city to the ground. I survived; my mother did not. I hid in the sewers.”

Here he drank some wine and let loose a small sigh.

“After the bombing I went back to where our house had been and there was nothing but ash. My mother had turned into a little black manikin one meter long. We scraped her off the cellar wall with pieces of a smashed toilet. And then the war was over and we learned the full story of our shame, and so we were not allowed to voice the suffering we had experienced. This destruction, this slaughter of children, these thousands of rapes we endured could not be acknowledged. It was our just recompense, our nemesis. And so most of my generation picked ourselves up and went on with life and rebuilt our country.”

He paused and I said, “What does that have to do with-”

He held up his fork. “Wait, be patient, I will get to that. So we all participated in rebuilding the country, but there were scars that could never be mentioned. Some of us never recovered from the disillusion, this massive betrayal, this nursery of lies in which we were raised. We were forever cut off from our fellow citizens, because any idea of a shared culture, our heimat, had been poisoned. The Nazis were very clever: they understood that to create a great evil you must pervert a great good, and this was our love of nation and family and culture.

“And when I asked my father what he had done in the war, he answered me honestly, and when I heard of it, I was not shocked, I did not reject him, because I knew in my heart I was no better than him, and I did not join the self-righteous of my generation, the ones who supposed they would have behaved so much more nobly than their parents in the same situation. So I became the person I am today. After my art studies were complete, I went to Switzerland and forged provenances and sold the paintings of the dead Jews without a single qualm. I said to myself that I was returning beauty to the world. Perhaps a self-serving lie, but, as I have suggested already, who does not tell themselves such lies? Yet the beauty is real, perhaps the only real thing there is. It does not save us, but it is better, I think, for there to be beauty than not. You have created a thing of great beauty, deep beauty, a thing that will last for as long as there are men to see it, and they will love it the more if they think it came from the hand of Diego Velázquez. This is foolishness, of course-the thing is the thing-yet who shall blame us if we profit from this foolishness? What legitimate business does not?”

“Well, gosh, you convinced me,” I said. “Now I can’t wait to forge again,” and he laughed and slapped the table.

“That is why I like you, Wilmot. One needs a sense of humor in this business, and also a certain cynicism. I tell you the most painful moments of my life, with Germanic seriousness and weltschmerz, and you make a joke of it. But one thing I cannot let slip, and that is the accusation that I am not a patron of your own work. In fact, I am. I believe that once you are freed from the necessity of whoring for the galleries and the commercial arts you will truly blossom as a painter. Those two little drawings prove it, and it will give me a great deal of personal satisfaction to see you do this.”

“You don’t think it’s too late?”

“Of course not! Who knew of Joseph Cornell until he was older than you? Even Cézanne sold hardly a painting until he was your age. And nowadays, with enough resources, one can secure a reputation. You would be surprised at how entirely corruptible is the world of art criticism. And you are good besides. I could make reputations for painters who do not have the talent that is in your little finger.”

He put down his fork and looked at the empty scampi shells with satisfaction. Mine remained half finished, and when the waiter came by I told him to take it away.

Krebs said, “I hope what I have been saying has not affected your appetite. No? Good, then perhaps we might now speak of this drug you have taken and the illusion that you are living the life of Velázquez.”

Well, obviously he’d gotten the story from Mark, I mean the early experiences in New York, and I told him the rest, about how I’d spent 1650 in Rome, while we enjoyed dishes of wild strawberries capriccio dio Wanda, cups of espresso, and a finale of grappa. The bottle was left at the table, and I had several.

When I’d finished talking, he said, “Well, I wouldn’t have believed it if I had not heard it from your own lips.”

“I still don’t believe it, and it happened to me.”

“Yes, and let me say, better you than me, Wilmot. I would not take such a drug for any consideration.”

“Why not? You could end up Holbein.”

“Yes, or Bosch. Or standing up to my nose in shit in a Dresden sewer for ten hours. Again.” He shuddered. “In any case, an interesting phenomenon. You ingest a drug and you experience events outside the bounds of rational explanation. Tell me, are you familiar with the theory that we have five bodies?”

“No,” I said, “but I’m not sure I want to know about it, if it’s going to scare me worse than I am already.”

He smiled like the mad scientist in a bad movie, mock sadistically, or maybe not that mock. “Yes, so first we have the body that science and medicine deal with, the meat, the nerves and chemicals and so on. Then we have the second, the representation of the body in the mind, which does not always match the reality of the first-phantom limbs and so on-plus the sense of ourselves and the recognition that this thing also exists in others, as when we feel the loom of another person close to us or look into another’s eyes.”

He looked into my eyes and grinned.

“Third we have the unconscious body, the source of dreams and, we think, also of creativity. It is the task of the mystics to merge the second with the third body to find the soul, as they would put it. Those who accomplish this are the only ones who are truly awake-everyone else is a robot enslaved to the mass mind, as pumped out by the media or established by social norms. Then fourth is the magical body, by which adepts can be in two places at once or walk through walls or heal the sick or curse their enemies. Finally there is the spiritual body, which Hegel called the zeitgeist. The one who can control all the other bodies and also controls history.”

“You believe all this?”

He shrugged. “It’s just a theory. But it does explain some things. It explains how you could become Velázquez. It helps to explain why the most cultivated and educated nation in Europe should have submitted itself happily and enthusiastically to the absolute power of an ill-bred corporal. I can tell you, Wilmot, I was there, just a boy perhaps, but I was there. I felt the power. For my first years of conscious life I was living entirely in someone else’s dream, and my father, who is no fool, was the same. Even now, it is hard for me to believe that such power was entirely of this world. And when it was over, as soon as he blew out his brains, I felt a sense of release, of waking out of a long dream, and every German who was conscious at the time will tell you the same story. We looked around at the ruins and asked ourselves, how did this happen? How did ordinary Germans do such terrible things? Some people have argued that Germans are naturally brutal and undemocratic, at your knees or at your throat, as they say, but this is unsatisfying. The French terrified Europe for far longer than the Germans ever did, and they are always held up as the model of civilization, and the Scandinavians were monsters of destruction for three centuries and are all lambs up there now and don’t hurt a fly. And besides that, if we are naturally so awful, how come we are today the least militaristic nation on earth? So my point is that, if such a mysterious and unexpected thing could happen to a whole nation, I think that when a man tells me he is living for periods in a different time and having the thoughts of a man long dead, I say, why not?”

“Yeah, easy for you to say.”

“I appreciate your difficulty, my friend. But on the other hand, even without, let us say, artificial means of enhancement, you would still be a dweller in mystery. You remember what Duchamp said about art: ‘Only one thing in art is valid-that which cannot be explained.’ I think even your Dr. Zubkoff would agree that the creative capacities of the human mind remain beyond human explanation. And I’ll tell you this, Wilmot. I am a very successful man-that is, I have as much money as I require, and my family, such as remains, is well provided for. I have enough experience with men who have vastly more wealth to convince me that I am not this type, I am not interested in accumulating more money than I can possibly spend in a lifetime. I do not dream of the Werner Krebs Museum or the Krebs Trust doing the good works. I scheme and deal, I buy and sell-this is for more years than you have been alive, I think-and I confess, life becomes a little dull, and in my secret thoughts I say to myself, maybe I shall grow careless and end up in prison or dead. This is exciting for some time, but even this fades, and really, I would rather not be imprisoned or dead. So what shall I do? I don’t know. And then, as from nowhere, comes Charles P. Wilmot, Jr., into my life, and suddenly I am as a boy again selling my first stolen painting.”

I said, “I’m glad you’re happy, Mr. Krebs.” And I was. I had a pretty good idea about what it was like if Krebs was not happy with you.

“I am. I tell you what is most remarkable about you, Wilmot. You are a genius, but you are not a son of a bitch. I have dealt with these before now and it is no fun. But I like you, I really do. And we are going to have fun, a lot of fun, you and I. There is something I have been longing to do for over fifty years that I believe you can help me accomplish, but…excuse me, I believe I must take this call.”

A little tune had played, Bach’s Toccata in D on a harpsichord, and Krebs pulled a cell phone from his inner pocket. He turned slightly away from me and spoke rapidly in German.

I finished my grappa, conscious of a strange feeling after this speech from Krebs, thinking about what Lotte had said about collectors falling in love with artists, and also about the doomed little girl that Frankenstein falls for, and also about Fay Wray and Kong. Lotte always used to quote a saying of La Rochefoucauld ’s that there were some situations in life that you have to be half crazy to escape from. If that were really true, I thought then, I should be just fine.

Two days later we moved to Madrid, occupying a couple of suites at the Villa Real. Our party was made up of the king (Krebs), the First Murderer (Franco), the Fool (me), and a new guy, the Second Murderer (Kellermann), who met us at the Madrid airport in the usual gangster Mercedes limo. I gathered he was an employee at Krebs’s secret mountain hideout in Bavaria, a large, polite blondie with nice teeth. Franco had nice teeth too, which you usually don’t see on Europeans. I asked him about it once and he told me that Herr Krebs insists on good dental care for all his staff, pays for it out of his own pocket. An unashamed patron is Herr Krebs, and it wouldn’t surprise me much to learn he arranged their marriages too.

All in all it was kind of neat to be part of Herr Krebs’s little court. The life of an international criminal is not a strenuous one, which is why it’s so popular. We rose late, ate well; Krebs and I toured the galleries and museums, strolled the temperate plazas at night, and ate tapas and heard music and discussed art on a high level.

Yes, nice indeed to be driven in a limo everywhere and to stay in this really snazzy hotel and never have to wonder about where you’re going. It was not that great being an American in Spain since the Iraq shit started and the Madrid metro bombings, and I detected dirty looks, subtle rudenesses, and obscene comments behind the backs of the Americans I saw strolling obliviously around this hotel.

Which was five-star, naturally, old on the outside, sleek as a fighter jet on the inside, furnished in leather and brushed steel, wired to the gills. Krebs told me I couldn’t make phone calls without permission, and I haven’t, but he didn’t say anything about e-mail. We had Wi-Fi in our suite and I was able to cruise the Web (all those sites about memory and craziness, although there does not seem to be an organization devoted to fixing what’s wrong with me) and communicate with my children, chatty e-mails from Milo with links to cool websites and videos, and from Rose I got, “hEllo DadDDy I am FIIN” with little drawing-program pictures attached. Lotte didn’t answer the ones I sent her.

And then one night we drove out to the west end of the city, to a commercial street on the other side of Bailén. In a vacant loft, lit bright as day by big portable worklights, we found a couple of familiar faces, Baldassare and Salinas from the Palacio de Livia museum. Salinas informed us that the tests of the paint samples had been perfect; the little scrape was chemically indistinguishable from similar ones taken from undoubted Velázquez paintings. He seemed sad when he said this-maybe he was having second thoughts, or maybe it was his curatorial faith in technology receiving a deadly blow. Anyway, we were obviously on to the next phase.

On a couple of big glass-topped tables pushed together I saw my Venus and another painting, just the same size, that looked a lot like The Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Jacopo Bassano, which hangs in the National Gallery in D.C. Both paintings had been taken off their stretchers and were laid flat on the tables, the Bassano weighted taut with small leather shot bags. I noticed that the fake Velázquez had been adhered in some way to a thick glass sheet somewhat larger than the painting. The air in the loft was close and smelled of old building, turps, and some chemical I couldn’t identify.

“What’s going on, Werner?” I asked.

“Well, you see we have your wonderful painting, but, as I’ve told you, however wonderful it is, it will not pass as genuine unless it has a flawless provenance. What do you think of the other painting?”

“It looks like a Bassano,” I said.

“Yes, but which one? He had four sons, all painters, and the work from their hands is not nearly as valuable as the father’s.”

“The story of my life,” I said, “but this one looks a lot like the one in Washington. It’s a nice painting. How do you tell the various Bassanos apart anyway?”

“It’s almost impossible without evidence from provenance. But this particular painting was in fact sold as a Jacopo to the duke of Alba in 1687. It’s been in the family’s possession ever since, and so its provenance is as good as any provenance can be.”

“Yeah, but what does that have to do with the Velázquez?” I said, and then I yelled.

Baldassare had taken a wide brush full of thick white paint and wiped a line right across my fake Venus, and a second later I realized why he’d done it and why we were all there. Baldassare gave me a smirk and continued to paint over the nude.

“You’re going to lift the Bassano and adhere it on top of the Venus,” I said, and the sweat popped out all over my face and scalp. Now at last this was the thing itself, the patent act of fraud, no more horseshit about indistinguishable works of art and buyer beware and who are we hurting. And that’s why we all had to be there, the same reason why a junior mafioso has to make his bones before he becomes a made guy. I had to get dirty.

“Yes, we are,” Krebs said. “Only it’s not a Bassano at all.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s the work of your most illustrious predecessor, Luca Giordano. Underneath the surface is his signature. The duke was fooled, and this time Luca did not confess. The thing has been hanging as a Bassano for three hundred years, until Salinas here had it cleaned and X-rayed as a matter of routine. He saw the signature of the faker and called me.”

“Why?” I asked. I was watching Baldassare obliterate my painting with what I presumed was the finest seventeenth-century flake white.

“Because of the provenance. Our curator here has just discovered that a painting worth perhaps a quarter of a million euros is now worth no more than twenty thousand. This happens in museums all the time. Sometimes they continue to hang the painting with a revised attribution, school of so-and-so, for example. Sometimes they sell it. Salinas decided that the painting should be sold. Now, he conspires to commit a little fraud of his own, this naughty man, with the connivance of his superiors at the museum, of course. Suppose that he puts the painting on the market discreetly as a Jacopo Bassano. Americans love old masters, and one of them is sure to want this one. So Salinas calls our friend Mark Slade.”

“Who else?”

“Yes, and if an American can be gulled, so much the better. Who likes Americans nowadays? Perhaps you have noticed this, eh? Yes, very sad. And Mark is a good choice in another way. He specializes in very private sales to rich Yankees by museums in need of cash. All museums have too many pictures to show, second-rate pieces cluttering the basement, and they don’t like going to the auction houses because they don’t want to be accused of selling off the national patrimony or the endowed collection of some rich fool. So discretion is very important.”

Baldassare had by this time sprayed the surface of the Bassano with a clear substance. He carefully flipped it over facedown on a large plate of thin glass, a few inches larger on all sides than the painting, and reweighted it. Now he brushed the back of the canvas with a chemical whose scent I did not recognize but that had to be some kind of sophisticated solvent. Then we waited.

I wandered out of the glare and found that they’d supplied the forgery headquarters with a number of leather lounge chairs, a low table, and a large cooler full of beer and cold tapas. The furniture was all brand-new, down to the price stickers, and the refreshments were first class. I recalled what Krebs had said about the investment of his silent partners: someone was spending money without stint on this one.

Baldassare laid out the spread of food and drink and then dragged one of the chairs into the shadows and lay down. Krebs and Salinas were conversing quietly in Spanish, a conversation to which I was clearly not invited, and it was equally clear that Baldassare did not want to chat with me. I brought out my sketchbook and drew the scene, a less dramatic version of Vulcan’s Forge by Velázquez, and wondered what would happen if the cops burst in instead of Apollo.

Which didn’t happen. After a couple of hours a little alarm buzzed on Baldassare’s watch and we all got up to check out the tables. Baldassare and Salinas donned surgical gloves, and with steel spatulas the two men slowly pried the old canvas up from the paint layer of the Bassano. It took a while. Except for brief exchanges between the two men at work, all was silent. When the canvas was at last peeled away I could see only the bottom layer of the underpainting-the image was facedown on the glass sheet. Baldassare picked this up by its edges, rotated it, and then, with painstaking care, let it down on the damp layer of flake white covering the forgery. Jesus and the startled fishermen shone out through the glass. He then clamped the edges of the two glass sheets together with small steel clips.

“What do you think?” Krebs asked Baldassare.

“It’s good. I will squirt some solvent in there to release the glass over the top painting, then a few days in the oven, a little chemical treatment, a little wash, and you will have a wonderful sandwich. Then we take the bottom glass off and I’ll nail it to the original Bassano stretchers. Not more than four or five days.”

Handshakes all around, and we left Baldassare in the loft. In the street there was a car waiting for Salinas. When he’d gone and I was in our car with Krebs, I asked him, “So what’s the plan now?”

“The next phase is moving our painting to market, obviously. Salinas will call Mark. He will show him the painting as a genuine Jacopo of flawless provenance. Mark will ask for an X-ray analysis. In the presence of witnesses, Salinas will object.

“But he did X-ray it.”

“Yes, but with a single, highly corruptible technician. There is no record of this X-ray and the technician will not talk. To resume: Salinas will have explained to his management that he did not X-ray it because his curatorial eye told him it was probably a Luca forgery, but as long as this was mere suspicion he had decided to see if he could get a Bassano price out of it. His objection to having it X-rayed will be on record.”

“I’m not getting this,” I said. “Salinas knows the fake Bassano is a Velázquez. His superiors think it’s just a fake Bassano, and that they’re ripping off a stupid American by charging him the full Bassano price. So why does Slotsky go along with not doing an X-ray after he’s made a big deal about asking for one?”

“Oh, he relents, I’m afraid. After the argument, he apologizes to Salinas for doubting the word of a Spanish gentleman and writes out a check for the full Bassano price on the spot. This is also a much-witnessed transaction. The museum board laughs all the way to the bank. Obviously, once he has taken possession and has it back in the States, he decides to X-ray it, again with reliable witnesses, and discovers the hidden Velázquez. This is announced to the world, the process of technical and curatorial examination confirms the authenticity of the work and we go to auction. The Liria is furious of course, but what can they do except fire poor Salinas?”

“Wait a minute-auction? You told me this was going to be one of your discreet sales to a billionaire.”

He smiled and shrugged. “I lied. No, that is not exactly true. Frankly, I had not expected the work to be so very good, and so I assumed that a private sale would have been required. But not for our Venus, no, this one will go through the rooms to the highest bidder.”

On the following day I got up early and went down to the lobby of the hotel. We usually breakfast off room service, but today I didn’t feel like eating with Krebs and his two boys, so I said I wanted to eat early and hit the museums. The three big ones-the Prado, the Reina Sophía, and the Thyssen-are within walking distance of the hotel, and I wanted to look at pictures that were probably not all fakes. Krebs waved me off and said, “Franco will go with you. We are going out at two this afternoon.”

“Where to?”

“You’ll see,” he said. “There are some people who want to meet you.”

“What people?”

He smiled and exchanged a glance with Franco. “Have a nice time at the museum,” he said with a dismissive wave.

We went to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, which was the nearest. It’s the collection of a Dutch-born Swiss citizen with a Hungarian title who lived most of his life in Spain and was one of the great art collectors of the last century. He liked German expressionists and picked a lot of them up cheap in the thirties when the Nazis (whom his cousin Fritz was helping to finance) cleaned them out of German galleries as degenerate. A nice small collection of post-impressionists and the lesser impressionists and a handful of old masters, among which I was happy to see a Luca Giordano that he broke down and signed with his own name. It’s a Judgment of Solomon. There’s the great king got up in gilded breastplates and blond, just like Alexander the Great-funny, he doesn’t look Jewish-and there are the two contentious women and the executioner holding the live baby uncomfortably by one foot, while he reaches for his sword. It’s a little Rubensy and a little Rembrandty, a typical piece of late-Baroque wallpaper, beautifully drawn, but the expressions are waxworks and the paint surface dreary. The only exception is over to the left, the face of a little dwarf, a marvelous grotesque portrait that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Goya capriccio. The Bassano forgery was a lot better as a painting, the poor bastard.

Back in my room, a little depressed now, I had a drink or two from the minibar and watched Bayern play Arsenal on the television, and at a little past noon there came a knock on the door that connected my room to Krebs’s suite and an anouncement that lunch was served. I dined with Krebs, a fish soup and a platter of cold meats, a white wine and beer available.

That day the German papers were full of the uncovering of yet another terrorist plot; we talked about that and I told him about Bosco’s 9/11 installation and the ensuing riot, and he said he would have liked to have seen it. He was firmly on Bosco’s side and said he thought the typical American attitude to the terror attack inane and infantile. Less than three thousand dead and two office buildings destroyed in a nation of three hundred million? It was a joke, and a joke was the appropriate artistic response. Our grotesque reaction was the laughingstock of the world, although people were too polite or too frightened to voice it. Try seven hundred thousand civilian dead in a nation of sixty million, which was what the Germans lost from the Allied bombing, and nearly every building destroyed in some places!

And no artistic response at all-no poetry, no art, no dramas. About the Nazis and the Jews there is plenty, we must never forget and all that, but about the destruction of German urban life not a whisper. We started it, and deserved it, and that was that. But the Americans were innocent, Americans never did anything bad, even to suggest there was a connection between an aggressive foreign policy, a continuous violent interference in the affairs of other nations, and this event, oh, no, that was off the table entirely.

The funny thing about this attitude was that Lotte shared it, despite having been in lower Manhattan when the planes hit the towers and despite having a kid who went blue when there was any dust in the air. Lotte thought that the right response to terror was bravery. You cleaned up the mess, mourned the dead for a particular limited period, and then moved on. I shared this with Krebs and then we talked about art, and how art dealt with the various horrors the world was heir to, and I said that I never felt a need to deal with that aspect of life in what I did, and did that make me some kind of pussy. Easel painting in oils while the world burned? And he asked what was the worst century in European history before the twentieth. It was the fourteenth century. The Black Death, half the population dead, devastating famines, and still they hardly paused the continual wars. Yet they didn’t stop making art-Giotto, van Eyck, van der Goes.

“So we’re saved by beauty?” I said. “I thought beauty was passé. I thought the concept was king now.”

“No, saving or not saving is hardly the point, as I believe I’ve already said. Although I often think that God, if there really is such a being, only holds his hand from destroying us all because we create beauty for his amusement. And also I think submitting ourselves to the terror of beauty, the ravishment of it, prevents us from giving vent to the kind of despair that would lead to the absolute destruction of our kind. Do you know Rilke?”

He recited some German in that portentous way that people always recite poetry, and then translated, “‘For beauty’s only the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear. And the reason we adore it so is that it serenely disdains to destroy us.’ So, Wilmot, you are a terrorist also, just like your friend Bosco, but more subtle. They don’t riot against you, but maybe they should.”

“Yeah, but the Nazis were supposed to be big art lovers and it didn’t do much for their destructiveness.”

“Not so. The Nazis-we Nazis?-were simple looters by and large. They wanted the things that indicated imperial power, and their taste was uniformly bad. Kitschmenschen almost to a man.”

“Although Hitler was a painter,” I said. “That always makes me feel terrific about my profession.”

“A very bad painter,” he said, “and an ignoramus. He went to his grave, I believe, under the impression that Michelangelo Merisi-Caravaggio-and Michelangelo Buonarroti were the same person.”

Okay, fun talking about art, and in fact it did make me feel better a little, mainly because it reminded me of the safe haven I had with Lotte when things went sour with us-we could always talk about art. Maybe that’s its true purpose. But I figured I’d take advantage of the casual discussion to mine some information. I said, “So-these people we’re going to see. Since you’re being so mysterious, I’m going to presume they’re your gangster partners. Or sponsors. Cronies?”

“Yes. They are what you might call representatives of the consortium that set up this project.”

“And they’re like the Nazis? Murderers and art lovers in the same package?”

He gave me a stern look for a moment and then grinned. “Wilmot, you persist in being curious. I beg you, please, please do not be curious this afternoon! All right, I understand that you wish to know something about our friends. Very well. In general, only.”

He poured a glass of wine and drank some of it. “We look at the world today and we see interesting things. We say we are living in a global village, which is true enough, but what is not so often observed is that it is a village of feudal times. Legitimacy-the empire, let us say-has collapsed. Religious fanaticism is widespread, of course. Art is simply loot, with no transcendent purposes or value. On the one hand, in the so-called democracies, we see a political class composed of vapid hypocrites, beauty queens, and thugs, placed in office by propaganda and money. In the other former empire, we observe the expropriation of state property by simple gangsters. The rest of the world is ruled as it always has been, by tribal chieftains. So we observe vast masses of new wealth being seized by people who are largely amoral brutes-on a larger scale, just what happened in the original dark ages or in Germany in the thirties. Essentially, therefore, much of the world is controlled by a kind of condottiere. But unlike the originals, these men like to dwell in the shadows. I am speaking, you understand, not about the figureheads, the leaders we see on the television, but the henchmen-the corrupt company officers, the fixers, Central American and African looters. And this class blends into actual gangsters, the more respectable drug lords and arms dealers, the Asian triads, the yakuzas, and so forth. And because they dwell in the shadows they desire symbols of their status, so they can look every day and know they are somebody, and this is why art is stolen from museums and collections.”

“Yeah, but that has nothing to do with forgery. Why are these guys getting involved in this particular operation?”

“Ordinarily they would not; art forgery, as I’m sure you know, has historically been a petty affair. But in recent years all this has changed. The market value of paintings by the noble dead has increased by orders of magnitude. Hundred-million-dollar auctions are not unknown. And this kind of money can attract the sort of people we are talking about. Now, since I have been selling such people paintings for a while, when they think art they naturally come to Krebs. They say, Krebs, can this be done? And I say no, at first, the technical foolery we can do, of course, but really, forging a major work by an old master, who could possibly do this?”

Then he smiled broadly and reached over and patted my hand. He said, “And then I found you.”

“You assumed I could do this from looking at magazine covers and ads?”

“Of course not. That is, I was interested in you, but it was not until Mark sent me those paintings, the one of the movie star as Maria of Austria and the incomplete Los Borrachos, that I understood what you were capable of. When Mark told me you were hallucinating that you were Velázquez under the influence of some drug, it sounded insane, a fantasy, and yet there were the paintings. So I made my contacts and, as you Americans put it, I pitched the deal, and got the clearance and backing I needed.”

“So that’s why he paid me ten grand for half a copy of a painting.”

“Ten only? He charged me thirty-five for it.” Krebs laughed and added, “And well worth it at any price. And of course it is not a copy in any real sense. You recreated it as Velázquez, although I don’t pretend to understand how this can be.”

“Join the club.”

“Yes, but why and wherefore hardly matters at this point.” He clapped his hands briskly, ending that line of conversation. “So-I have described our masters to you. Shortly you will meet them for yourself.” He finished his wine, dabbed his mouth, tossed the napkin on his plate. “We should begin to prepare now. Bathe, shave, wear your best clothes. Do you need anything? Shoes, shirts, whatever?”

“No, I’m fine. So what is this, like a job interview?”

“Not exactly. They wish to personally certify the existence of Charles Wilmot. They wish to see the body.”

An hour later Franco drove me and Krebs to a hotel near Barajas Airport, all three of us dressed as for an important funeral, a head of state maybe, and we ascended to the top floor and past a small platoon of gentlemen in dark suits who made sure we weren’t carrying anything lethal, polite but thorough, and then we went into the suite. Three guys were sitting there, an Asian, someone who looked French or Italian, and a bald guy with the ice eyes and high cheekbones of a Slav. I wasn’t introduced and no one used names. The French guy did almost all the talking, and the conversation was in English. I was sitting in a side chair, a little behind the action, which was being conducted around a teak table in the center of the room. I tried not to listen, but I gathered they were talking about particular artworks loose on the secret market. After about twenty minutes of this, Krebs motioned me to come to the table.

All three of the men looked at me, but as you’d expect, given what they did for a living, their faces were perfectly unreadable: I might have been the view out the window of an airplane. The maybe-French guy said, “So you are the artist. We have heard great things about you.”

I said, “Thank you.”

He said, “Let’s see what you can do, then. Draw me.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I want you to draw a portrait of me. Here, use this!”

He slid across the table a single sheet of 150-pound drawing paper, 10 x 14. He assumed, correctly, that I had a drawing implement on me.

I had a pencil, but I figured this guy would be impressed by bravura, and so I used my fountain pen. Interesting face anyway, maybe in his early fifties, that French kind of nose, a long downward-sloping bridge with a little blob on the end, wide mouth with full lips, small dark eyes with generous pouches, oval chin, thick neck, hair dark, coarse like horsehair, a little gray at the sides, the face of a corrupt cardinal in the reign of the Sun King.

So-pen held vertically out at arm’s length, a cliché, but you really use it to transfer the proportions from life to the paper: the general shape of the face, the triangle formed by the eyes, and the mouth has to be perfect or you won’t get a likeness; start with those three dots and then four more to mark the top of the head, the sides, the chin, then the tip of the nose, another dot, and then the edges of the eyes and the mouth. You grow the drawing on the page, the eyes, the mouth, then the shadows formed by the mass of the nose and the lips. I worked for about half an hour, using a wetted finger to smear in the gray tones, and when I reached the point where any further potching around would’ve wrecked it, I slid the paper across the table.

He looked, he showed it to his partners, there was the usual release of tension you get when a likeness works. Magic, a little scary. It looked like him, cool and brutal; I hadn’t made it pretty and I could see he liked it and was irritated by it at the same time. Yes, that’s me, but who are you, you little pisser, to see me?

He slid the sheet into a leather portfolio on the table without the pretense of asking for it, nor did I object. And that was the meeting. A few more minutes, mainly pleasantries of a sort, and we were out of there. Back in the car, I asked Krebs why he’d done that, made me draw.

“Because, as I have told you earlier, they wanted to see you. And they wished to be certain you were really this marvelous artist. If you were really Charles Wilmot.”

“They wouldn’t take your word for it?”

“No. These are men who survive by being sure. Suppose I had brought along an imposter?”

“Why would you’ve done that, for God’s sake?”

“Oh, perhaps to preserve the real Wilmot for my own purposes,” he said casually, “and therefore to identify a valueless person as the artist. A dummy. Now, however, in case they decide to get rid of you, they know who you are.”

Some days followed on this event-three, ten? I can’t recall how many; people who don’t have schedules have that problem. Where did the week go? The way we lived cut us off from the rhythms of daily life, plus in my particular case my time sense has been ripped out of my brain, trampled on the ground, and stuck back in my skull upside down and crossways. I had no cell phone anymore, so I was as isolated as a man living in the seventeenth century. I could theoretically have made a call from the hotel phone, but I had been told not to in the strongest terms, and of course they’d know if I did.

The larger conspiracy continued. According to Krebs, Mark had duly “discovered” the hidden Velázquez and quietly summoned experts from Yale, from Berkeley; learned heads were put together, and tests were made. As we’d expected, the forensic tests checked out, the thing was deemed of seventeenth-century origin. The provenance, of course, was flawless. The Palacio Liria cried foul, but what could they do? The painting was bought in good faith as a Bassano, the museum knew it was a fake Bassano, and the fact that there was a real Velázquez hiding under it meant that they’d been hoist by their own petard, the swindler swindled. And the learned heads had looked at the art itself, the brushwork and so on, and concluded that yes, it must be so, this was Velázquez indeed, hooray.

There were objectors, of course, there always are, but mainly because they couldn’t swallow the subject: the dour Don Diego could not have painted so naughty a picture. Such people, we understood, would be looking for any hint of scandal, any hint of forgery, and so now was the most vulnerable hour, both for the Venus and for me. Krebs seemed to want to preserve my life for reasons of his own, and I was more than willing to play along with that, although I was kind of curious why.

One morning Franco and I set out for the Prado, nice day, spring in Madrid, not too hot, flowers blooming in the boulevard planters, pleasant scents abroad in the air from the botanical garden nearby. Stood for a couple of minutes in contemplation by the big blackened bronze statue of my guy that sits in front of the museum, wanted him to get down off his chair, fling his arm over my shoulder, and give me some fatherly advice, and for a second my head got all wobbly, smeared vision, and the bulk of the museum became vague, and I was looking through the park to the palace of Buen Retiro as it’d been in the seventeenth century, just for a second there, and-something I never did before-I kind of put my foot on the brake and came back to now. A new skill? Useful.

I avoided Velázquez’s paintings that day and spent my time on the top floor with the Goyas. Okay, here’s a guy came up the hard way, hustling commissions from crappy little convents and provincial churches, spent years doing cartoons for a tapestry workshop, comes to Madrid, gets named painter to the king, studies Velázquez, figures, oh, this is perfection, the perfect realization of a baroque world still intact-honor, glory, nobility, all that-and so he says, screw it, he’s going to paint the shattered world we see in dreams and also the world in his time, the bleeding subject of the nightmares brought forth by the dreams of reason. Here’s his portrait of the royal family, the polar opposite of Las Meninas, silly marionettes in a glass case, no air, their feet barely touch the ground. And his majas, they’re dolls, no one ever painted a nude so badly: the arms are wrong, the tits are insane, the head’s skewed on the neck, and yet this doll made up of spare parts has an incredible erotic authority. The pubic hair helps, the first real crotch in the history of European art. A mystery, but it works.

Franco, discreetly accompanying me, stared long at this one; it’s his favorite, obviously, and why not?

What was I thinking here? Death and madness, my Goyesque period, utter loneliness; about Lotte, she’d save me if she could, if I let her, the realest thing I know, her and the kids; and also about my dad-always when I think about Goya-about what he could’ve been, how he saw the war, why he didn’t harness that rage and bitterness into art, an exact contemporary of Francis Bacon, that’s who he should’ve been. Instead he decided to be almost as famous as Norman Rockwell.

And there I was in front of Goya’s Cronus Eating One of His Sons, the mad glare, bulging eyeballs, as he bites his victim’s head off, nothing else like it in art, the putrid yellow flesh of the titan in a light cast from hell, and then a moment of disembodiment and I’m gone, out of the Prado and back to my father’s studio, age ten or so. I’m not supposed to be back in the racks where he keeps all his old stuff, but I’m at the curious age; I want to know who is this titan controlling my world. Smell of paper and canvas and glue, top note of his cigars and turps from the studio on the other side of the closed door.

On tiptoe I reach and pull down a set of sketchbooks tied with twine. They’re exciting, secret, they have a history, beat up, the covers scored and dirty, one’s been in the water, rippled and stained. I open the twine and there’s his war, Okinawa, planes, ships, tanks, all the beautiful death machines, faces of young marines caught in unmanly terror, landscapes with shell craters, dressing stations lit by battle lanterns, the masked surgeons looking like figures from Bosch as they probe the ruined youths. And page after page of the dead, American and Japanese, lovingly rendered in watercolor, all the wonderful ways that high explosive, fast-flying metal, and flame can turn mankind into garbage: eviscerated bodies; exposed coils of gut, impossibly long, stretched out on the earth; smashed faces, eyeballs hanging from bloody stalks; the peculiar arty black forms, hideously “modern,” created when human beings incinerate, things I’d never imagined. No one ever sees this stuff, it’s like feces, it can’t be shown in public; you have to be there.

I loved it, of course, nasty little boy that I was, and I swiped the sketchbooks and took them back to my room, my little “studio” with my kid-sized easel and my first-class paints, and I started to copy. Being Goya to Velázquez, I wanted to learn how to do that, stroke, lick, smear, and there was a skinned traumatic amputation, a jawless face, solid, brilliant, puke making. I went through sheet after sheet of expensive Arches paper-never any lack of art supplies, he used to buy it all by the ton-and after a while, it took weeks, I had it down, I could do the glisten of naked bone against riven flesh, and one evening he found me at it, with the sketchbooks strewn around my room and the painting there on the block, and he bit my head off.

It wasn’t just the usual keep your hands off my things; he was enraged, insane, way more than he would’ve been if I’d tried to copy one of his Post covers or a corporate portrait; no, he’d buried this and I’d dug it up, and not only that, I’d seen it. And I wanted it, not the slick shit, I’d instinctively wanted the real thing, the entombed Goya he was, and not only that, I could do it too, at eight years old.

He just beat the shit out of me, practically the only time he ever did. I remember the beating and I stuck it away in the slot of don’t touch Daddy’s stuff, but not the rest; the underpainting was wiped away, leaving only the slick and meaningless surface.

I have a photo from around that time, Charlie must’ve snapped it: I’m on the floor of our sunroom with my sketchbook, drawing, and he’s in a wicker easy chair with a drink in his hand, and he’s looking at me, and he’s got the strangest expression on his face, not paternal pride at all, but doubt and fear, and I just figured that out, there in the Prado. I always thought, Hey, he was a son of a bitch in a lot of ways, and a shit to my mother, but at least he encouraged me as an artist, he was proud of my talent, but now I saw that wasn’t true, the opposite was true, all those drawing lessons, painting lessons-now I can really recall them, because I was ten-year-old me just a few minutes ago, and I know what he did, the subtle warping, the criticism. He wanted me to be just like him, a locked box, a successful mediocrity. And I thought again of that gorgeous loft on Hudson Street and the painting in it, and I felt like I’d been socked in the belly; I literally could not breathe for a long minute.

“Are you okay?”

Franco was looking into my face and he was all blurred. I’m going blind now, hysterical blindness, I was thinking, maybe a mercy, and I said, “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?” and he said, “You’re crying.” And I laughed (hysterically) and said, “I’m not crying, it’s the pollen. I have hay fever”-a lie, just like my life. And what the fuck am I supposed to do with it now, this revelation, this understanding? Someone once said understanding was the booby prize, and oh, it’s true.

At that point I couldn’t stand to look at any more pictures, and we exited out to the Paseo, the wide boulevard that runs in front of the museum, and waited in a crowd of tourists at the crosswalk for the light to change-they wait in Madrid, unlike Rome, where no one waits for traffic. I was right by the curb, under a putrid cloud of self-pity, when something slammed me hard in the back and threw me right into the path of a city bus.

I was down on my knees and the bus was almost on top of me-I saw a band of red paint and above it the reflecting windshield of the monster-and then I was heaved into the air with a force that nearly yanked my arm from its socket, and the edge of the bus’s bumper smacked into my heel, ripping my sneaker from my foot as the air brakes screeched.

I found myself lying face-up on top of Franco, who also lay face-up on the sidewalk, the pair of us like a couple of lounge chairs stacked poolside. He’d pulled me so hard he’d fallen down on his back. He scooted out from under me and stood scanning the crowd, but whoever had done it had vanished. He helped me to my feet, or foot, because the left one was out of action. According to Franco, the guy had snaked in through the crowd and hit me from the right. Neither of us thought it’d been an accident or a maniac.

We hobbled back to the hotel, which fortunately was only about a hundred yards distant. I thanked him for saving my life, and he shrugged and said, “No problem.”

When we got back to the suite he tended me like a mommy, fetching ice for my wounded heel, ordering new sneakers from the concierge, pouring me a scotch. Yeah, he was just doing his job, but it was nice anyway, a sere form of human contact, but better than the howling waste of isolation into which I had fallen. Somebody just tried to kill me, but I was more terrified of life than of imminent death; it left me strangely, unnaturally calm. I have a feeling that’s what my dad was like on Okinawa, or he wouldn’t have been able to see what he saw and make it into art.

Krebs had been out somewhere with Kellermann, but when he came back and got the story of the attempted murder he immediately turned our lazy and louche little ménage into the Afrika Korps: orders snapped out, scurrying of the foot soldiers. Within an hour of his return, we were en route to the airport.

“Where are we going?” I asked him when we were in the car. I’d asked before but no one had bothered to answer me.

“We’ll fly to Munich,” he said. “I’ve arranged a jet.”

“What’s in Munich?”

“Many cultural wonders, but we’re not going to stay in Munich. It’s the nearest major airport to my home.”

“You’re taking me home?”

“Yes. I believe it’s the only place I can guarantee your safety until this thing is finished and the picture has been sold and my associates are paid off.”

“Your associates just tried to kill me,” I said. I guess I was a little irritated that he hadn’t made more of a fuss, oh, my dear Chaz, can you forgive me, I’m sorry, are you all right? And like that, but nothing: he listened to Franco’s report of the incident and barely looked at me while we were getting ready to leave.

He patted my leg and said, “Cheer up, Wilmot. Imagine that you are Caravaggio, fleeing a charge of murder, or Michelangelo defying the Pope, or Veronese under the thumb of the Inquisition.”

“I never wanted to be any of those guys.”

“No, you wanted to be Velázquez, with an honorable sinecure in the royal household, a liveried coat, and a bag of golden reales every quarter.”

“Yeah, and I thought that’s what I was getting.”

“So you shall, but you know even Velázquez had to go to dangerous Italy twice in his life, and not only to look at pictures. And didn’t he plunge into a risky affair with that woman, as you yourself have recounted, and didn’t he paint those wonderful nudes?”

I stared at him. “That was a fantasy. That was the drug screwing with my head.”

And now he turned and looked at me, and it was uncanny, like he’d turned into a different person or like I was seeing him properly for the first time. The slightly manic air he usually had was gone, and he looked tired, and older, and somehow more caring. I have no idea how he did it. He looked at me this way for what seemed like a long time. Then he said, “Was it really? You spend a good deal of time in a fantasy world, don’t you? Perhaps this idea that you forged a Velázquez accepted by the whole world as genuine was also a fantasy. Perhaps it really is genuine after all. How could you tell?”

“What do you mean, how could I tell? I remember every fucking brushstroke on that thing.”

“Yes, and your memory is full of things that did not in fact happen to you, as you yourself confess. So this is not an impressive claim.”

“But the painting is real. I saw it. I saw Salinas test it. I saw you phony it up with that Bassano fake.”

“Did you? Tell me, do you actually know who I am?”

“Yes, of course I know who you are. You’re Werner Krebs, art dealer and criminal mastermind, and for some reason you’re trying to fuck with my brain.”

“My friend, your brain is, as you put it, fucked up beyond my poor power to add or reduce. And why would I do that, if I am such a criminal? Perhaps I am actually trying to bring a brilliant but psychotic artist back to reality. Perhaps I am a psychiatrist hired by your family to take you to my clinic in rural Bavaria.”

“Oh, right. But I don’t have the kind of family that shells out for Bavarian clinics, remember? Lotte can barely pay her rent, I have a sick kid, and my son from my first marriage wouldn’t pay a nickel to save my life.”

“Yes, but perhaps that is the case only in your paranoid ideation. Suppose, however, that in truth you are a well-known and famous artist, whose work routinely sells in the six figures, and that all these memories of failure and frustration are part of the psychosis.”

And now that whole New York thing, which I had been repressing all this time, came snarling out of its box and started tearing big chunks out of my sense of who I was. The result was paralyzing terror. What did I know? Montaigne’s question, and I couldn’t answer it. I shook. I sweated. I shut down: the traffic sounds and Krebs’s voice seemed to come through thick insulation.

“Wilmot,” he said, in that same calm professional voice, “believe me when I say that although you are a brilliant painter, you have no way of distinguishing what is real from what is the product of your afflicted brain and of the drug you were given.”

“We went to see those gangsters,” I said dully. “I was pushed in front of a bus. I remember that.”

“Yes, this is how you interpret your appearance before, let us say, a mental health commitment board-international gangsters. And you jumped in front of the bus, Wilmot. This is why Franco must follow you everywhere. You could have been badly injured. Well, in any case, here we are at the airport.”

“I’m not talking to you anymore,” I said.

He smiled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, “but we shall see what happens. It is early days yet in our relationship.”

They led me out of the car and onto a plane; I did as I was told, without will, moving slowly like one of those sad brain-damaged vets you see in the documentaries, and we flew out of Spain on an elegant little thing, a six-passenger job carrying me, Krebs, Franco, and Kellermann. Kellermann slept in the rear the whole way, snoring; Franco was next to me and Krebs was up front talking on his cell phone in German.

“Franco,” I said when we were up in cloudland, “tell me, did you get a look at the guy who pushed me in front of the bus?”

“What guy?” he answered. “You jumped.”

Stupid to ask, really, Franco a faithful servant of the king. Although Krebs had said he wasn’t, that he worked for the bad guys. Who knew? Was that the first mirror in the hall of mirrors? Were there bad guys at all?

I reclined my seat and tried not to think about anything. It’s harder than it sounds, although apparently the holy men do it all the time. It must be very restful, not to think.

We landed, we got in a big Mercedes, just me and Krebs and Franco-Kellermann had been assigned some errand-and we drove north on the A9 autobahn. It’s nice to drive in a powerful car on the German autobahn: there are no speed limits and the peasants are wise enough to keep out of the left lane. I got a kick out of the big blue signs that read Ausfahrt Dachau; gotta love the Germans-they’re sorry, but not that sorry, not sorry enough to change the name of a town that’s a curse in every other civilized country. I mentioned this to Krebs, who gave me the kind of look you give to kids who mention poo-poo at the dinner table, and then he started talking about where we were going, a part of Bavaria known as the Fränkische Alb, a real beauty spot apparently, quite isolated even in crowded Germany. His father had bought the house just after the war, along with a substantial area of surrounding land. Much of the neighborhood was a nature preserve, but he had fishing and hunting rights on his own land. Did I like to fish? To hunt?

I said I did, and was this part of my therapy?

“Of course,” he said genially. “Everything is part of therapy. But I think the best thing will be if you have your family around you. I have been in contact with your ex-wife and she has agreed to visit. I am truly looking forward to meeting your children.”

At which point I started to cry.

I sat in that car, slumped in a corner with my temple against the cool glass, watching the sweat and tears flow down the window, thinking, Oh, yeah, I bet he was looking forward to meeting my kids, then he’d have total control over me, the master manipulator. Who did I think he was-right, the question Jesus asked his disciples, but in my case no answer came. Rolling through the possibilities in my mind, logic a comfort, a sign that the brain’s still functioning. No, actually, maniacs are flawlessly logical, it’s their premises that are false. Dredging up memories, my Cartesian theater lit up and roaring, all the crap jobs I’d done, the details of the paintings, my loft, the meals I’d eaten, cubic yards of Chinese food and pizza, the children in the loft, the move to Brooklyn, the furniture of our house, my life with Lotte, the agony of our divorce…Yeah, it was there in my head, solid, reliable, visuals, audio, even smells, twenty years of life.

And then I recalled my life as Velázquez and it was the same: grinding pigments; laying on the paint; my wife, Juana; talking with my teacher and father-in-law, Pacheco; walking with the king in the gardens of Buen Retiro, painting him, his ugly, gentle face, all just as real. Besides that, I have the same vivid memories of a whole year that never happened to me, and no memories at all of three months that did, apparently. And I knew it couldn’t be real, so what good was memory? It was no good at all, and without that existential confidence, I was nothing, I was in there with the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, deep brain malfunction, like those people who think their wives are robots sent from the CIA.

Other explanations? A gigantic conspiracy? Terrific, that’s not just schizophrenia, that’s paranoid schizophrenia. Paranoia’s related to memory, that’s clear, Alzheimer’s patients attacking their kids, becoming suspicious, who are all these strangers pretending to love me? Happening to me too, inevitable. And Shelly Zubkoff-did that really happen at all, or was that a fantasy too, an excuse to retreat from reality, like the CIA rays that make necessary the wearing of tinfoil helmets?

Why would Krebs do such a thing? If he’s Krebs the criminal, why am I still with him? He’s got the painting. A handshake and good-bye for Wilmot would be more to the point, or a knock on the head-thinking of Eric Hebborn, greatest faker of the last century, besides me, had his head cracked open in Rome, murder never solved. How would someone like Krebs handle forgers who’ve outlived their usefulness? He’s planning to kill me in his secret mountain laboratory? No, Franco saved me, and Franco works for Krebs. Unless Franco pushed me and then pretended to save me, so that I’d be scared, so that I’d stick with Krebs, a docile tool, and get my family into his clutches. Again, if true, why? And then, why rig up this dark legion of background heavies, that interview, maybe it was a setup entirely, a show with actors, so that I’d see Krebs as my protector instead of my persecutor-but why go through all that trouble, like I wouldn’t do what he wants out of simple fear? I would, I admit it, I’m a total chicken.

But all this is just what a paranoid maniac would think, the desperate attempt of a mind unhinged to seek some rational explanation that doesn’t involve the One Big Fact: that everything I remember about the last few decades of my life is false. That I’m Someone Else. So my thoughts go around and around, Krebs sitting next to me; I’m a silk-wrapped fly in his web. I can’t look at him.

Meanwhile, underneath all these thoughts, like a suppurating ulcer you can’t stand to look at, was what happened in New York, those paintings. That was real all right, and an insinuating voice in my head was saying, Oh, Chaz, come back, come back to your real and only life.

Right, shit, it’s easy to sit here and recount or try to recount what went through my head on that fucking car ride, but it’s a lot harder to recapture the feelings, the hamster in a wire wheel spinning, the car on black ice out of control. What I did eventually was breathe slow and deep and contemplate the glories of nature. Not all that glorious on the autobahn, mainly a blur, but we turned off onto a secondary road south of Ingolstadt and drove on west into the sun. The day had begun cloudy but cleared up later in the afternoon, a spring day in the ancient heart of Europe, forests of dark spruce and beech just coming into leaf, that ravishing pale green hard to get with paint, too easy to make it acid, chloriney, tube colors no good, you have to use a very pale gray undercoat and work it in with greens you make out of ultramarine and chrome yellow, thin washes over the off-white, marvelous against the almost blacky green of the spruces, and there were fields of intense violent yellow rapeseed, and other fields just greening up with grain, and the shadows of the clouds flying over them a different light show every minute.

Every so often we slid through a town, old squares lined by half-timbered houses with overhanging roofs, and the churches of the local stone with their clocked steeples mosaicked with stones of different colors, some wonderful anonymous artists of the baroque, and it made me feel good to see that. Later the towns came more infrequently and the land rose a thousand feet or so; the forest closed in on the road, and we turned in to the forest itself, dark with shafts of light shooting down through the trees, reddening as the sun got lower, the kind of effect that was transcendent in the baroque and kitsch in the late nineteenth century, acres of Teutonic landscapes stuffing third-rate museums. Then down an allée of beeches entwined overhead, and at last the house.

I suppose I had imagined a Dracula castle, black sweating stone with Gothic turrets and gargoyles, but this was just a large, three-story Bavarian house, with the usual sharply peaked, hipped roof and half-timbering. I wanted it to exude an air of menace, but it just sat there, clumsy and plain as pumpernickel. It might have originally been the manor house of a substantial estate. There were some outbuildings in a more modern style clustered around it; one was a garage. Franco stopped the car in front of it and we all got out.

Just like on Masterpiece Theater, I was glad to see, the staff gathered at the front door to greet the returning master. Two middle-aged people, Herr and Frau Bieneke, she the housekeeper, he the majordomo, butler, whatever you call it, plain and competent looking; a couple of young housemaids, Liesl and Gerda, goggling at me shyly; the cook, Frau Bonner, in apron, red and damp faced; and two men, Revich and Macek, Slavic in appearance, whose duties were not defined but who were obviously the muscle. Krebs made the intros with seigneurial graciousness; the staff nodded, smiled; I nodded, smiled. Everyone had very good teeth. We went inside, and Krebs left me in the hands of Herr Bieneke to show me my rooms and the layout.

We went through the entrance foyer into what seemed to be the main hall, and here my imagination was at last satisfied: flagged floors with scattered Oriental rugs, heavy black furnishings with studded red leather upholstery, a stone fireplace, deer antlers up and down the walls with a couple of boars’ heads mounted among them, a full suit of armor standing in one corner, and over the fireplace a vast trophy, a shield with a coat of arms on it and a dozen or so swords and pole-arms. A bearskin with snarling head lay in front of the fireplace to complete the Teutonic splendorama.

I got the whole tour. Top floor servants’ quarters, Bieneke and the frau live in a farmhouse on the property. The master has his suite, office, bedroom, study, on the ground floor; I was shown the door, but not the inside. At the back of the house, a wonder, a huge artist’s studio; the man tells me that Herr Krebs’s father added it to the house. A wall of windows connecting to a skylight two floors above, a professional easel, the usual worktables, cabinets. Signs of long-ago painting, faded spatters, but no sniff of turps, no one has used this room in a long time. I ask. The old man painted a little, and Herr Krebs when young, but not recently. Interesting.

Below the main floor are the kitchen, storerooms, the usual, and a door in the back leading to the basement. We descend the stairs. All old stonework, original, must be seventeenth century at least, arches and niches suitable for hogsheads of wine and beer, now filled with wine racks and central heating equipment. In a corner I see a small ironbound door, low, set into the wall, looks original to the house. What’s down there? Nothing, sir, an old well, dangerous, kept locked at all times. Aha, there’s the secret, I thought, the Bluebeard room, where the dead wives are kept, the Nazi memorabilia, the crates of gold coins.

Then up a staircase with heavy carved banisters to the second floor and down a hall to a room, mine. Nice room, simply furnished: a wooden bed with posts, checked bedspread, goosefeather pillows, a desk, chair, the usual lamps, a door to a bathroom, fortunately the latest, not at all what you’d expect, obviously a great deal of expensive renovations in the recent past.

Dinner was me and Krebs, served by the two girls, decent heavy food, soup, chops, spaetzle, a rich cake. Conversation sputtered a little; I was almost mute, because if you’re no one, you don’t have much to say. So he gave me a history of the house, it dated from 1694, the country seat of a servant of the Bavarian monarchy. Extensively modified, of course. He went on about the delights of the countryside, the seasons. He hunts boar and will take me if I like, if I am still here in the fall. Or there is a river, we can catch trout. I didn’t object to his assumption that I would be an indefinite guest. No more talk about psychiatry. We’re pals now. The wine helped. I drank most of a bottle of Rhône.

After dinner, he invited me to his end of the house for a cigar, a cognac. More comfortable there, he said, and yes it was, a large room that looked like a museum of modern design. The walls were oyster; the furniture was all leather, brushed steel, glass, marble, and rare woods, beautiful designs, the best studio stuff, all handmade and ferociously expensive: a desk, a comfortable-looking sling chair, an elegant couch, of the type a wealthy psychiatric patient might be expected to lie in and tell Herr Dr. Krebs about early trauma. The ceiling was high and one wall was entirely glass, looking out into the night, a moonlit meadow, black woodlands beyond. There was a wall of books, mostly gigantic treatises on various artists, and several shelves of medical tomes in many different European languages, plus a tropical marine fish tank built into the wall and swimming with clownfish and a variety of other colorful creatures. An elaborate sound system in dull gray steel looked custom-made and was softly playing a Mozart violin concerto. Above the sound system, rank on rank, were framed awards and diplomas. Their language was Latin but I could make out on each the name of Werner Krebs.

Three paintings hung on the remaining pale wall: a Cézanne view of Mt. St. Victoire, a Matisse odalisque in a pink room, and in the center, a large gilt-framed altarpiece, a Virgin with child and donors by some Flemish master.

Krebs handed me a balloon glass charged with cognac and asked me if I could identify the altarpiece.

I sipped cognac and said, “It looks like a van der Goes.”

“Yes. An early work, but already he shows the sympathy for the ordinary man for which he was famous. Obviously the Virgin and the angel are at the center, but observe the servants staring longingly in at the window, their care-worn faces. A very van der Goes touch. He was a member of the Brethren of the Common Life, you know, almost a monk. He went mad from the conflict between his growing fame as a painter and the demands he made on himself to be humble. A sad case.”

“Is it real?”

“Does it matter? The technique is there, the iconography is correct, the religious fervor shines from every corner of the panel. You feel it, I feel it. If a spectrograph showed titanium white in it, would those qualities, those feelings vanish?”

“A nice point, but I also think you wouldn’t hang a fake in your study. Where did you get it? Nazi swag?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said agreeably. “As are the others. I couldn’t bear to part with them. A vice of all art dealers, I’m afraid.”

“So your old dad really did get away with the Schloss paintings.”

He gave me a strange look, surprise, a brief irritation, then amusement. “Alas, no, he did not.”

“What about those two vans out of Munich?”

He smiled now. “Excellent, you have been studying my history. Very commendable. As it happens, however, we were only able to move one of the vans into Switzerland; the other was caught in the Dresden bombing, and this contained the Schloss material. A great pity that so much beauty should be permanently lost to the world. But would you like to see something of more particular interest?”

Now I was drunk; the wine and the cognac had loosened me up. The craziness was still boiling underneath, but the supposed real me had recovered a little nerve. I said, “Does that mean pornography, Doctor?”

“Of a type,” he said, and walked to the far end of the room. He opened a door and motioned me through. It was his bedroom, a lot larger than mine and furnished like a television starship. There were several small paintings on the walls but I had eyes only for one.

“Where the hell did you get that?” I said.

“It turned up in London some years ago, an auction at Christie’s. Remarkable, isn’t it?”

Yeah, it was. A small oil, maybe twenty-five by thirty inches; in the left foreground a couple of teenage marines were standing, one lighting a cigarette, the other looking out at us with the usual thousand-yard stare. In the center of the picture lay a Japanese soldier writhing in flames, ignored, his crisped hand reaching up to uncaring heaven, and behind him was a marine with a flamethrower, the obvious cause of this event, and in the same plane a group of other marines hanging around, smoking, talking to each other, taking a break. Above, a dirty early-evening sky; behind, a scorched and pocked hillside and the mouth of a cave smoking like the gates to hell. The thing had been painted with the authority and bravura brushwork of The Surrender of Breda by Velázquez. It seemed to me to be a historical painting of similar quality, and you could tell that the artist was thinking of that earlier painting when he did it: this is what war’s like now, folks: gormless, brutalized farm boys having a human barbeque, and note the absence of courtly gentlemen bowing to one another on the field of honor. Signed with my dad’s familiar monogram and the date, 1945.

Krebs studied my face as I looked at the painting and asked, “You find it depressing?”

“Not the subject matter so much as the waste. How he could do this and then have the life he had.”

“You might ask yourself the very same question.”

“I might and I do. Is this part of my therapy, Doctor?”

“If you want it to be.”

“What I want is for you to tell me why you’re doing this, the fake psychiatrist routine.”

“Is it a fake? You seem to be particularly interested in fakes, Wilmot. I wonder why. Come with me, I want to show you something else.”

We left the bedroom and went back to the study. Krebs reached up to a bookshelf and took down a large-format art book. He motioned me to sit down on one of his delicious leather chairs and laid it on my lap. It had a realistic painting of a beautiful red-haired woman on the cover. She was reclining in a plush purple chair and holding to her crotch a wooden hand mirror, in which was reflected a penis. In large block letters a title: WILMOT. Soft covers, but expensively printed. My eyes blurred; I blinked. Pressure began in my temples and the dense German dinner began to stir in my belly.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“It’s a catalog raisonée of your show at the Whitney, a few years ago,” said Krebs.

I ignored the text and paged through the plates. I recognized some of the work from my first and only gallery show, and the others were just like the paintings in the Enso Gallery and the thing on the easel in the Hudson Street loft. I didn’t know what to say, couldn’t really have said anything, my mouth so dry, my speech centers shut down for the night.

“Take it,” said Krebs. “Study it. Maybe it will bring some memory-”

I shot to my feet, flinging the book away from me like some loathsome insect that had crawled unseen onto my lap, and dashed out of the room without another word. I walked through the house, not knowing where I was going, my brain frozen.

I ended up in the studio. All dark, of course; I scrabbled at the walls until I found a light switch. Why here? Good place for a suicide, lots of toxic solvents in a studio. There was a balcony too, throw a rope around the rail up there, stand on a stool, jump off.

An immense canvas set up on the easel. Smell of turpentine became stronger, someone’s been painting pictures. Not me, though.

Sound of steps coming closer, and the light’s changed too, not the harsh glare of fluorescents, but gray daylight filtering through a tall window. High ceilings in a large room with its walls covered in paintings, a mirror on one wall, coffered doors.

She says, “Are you ready for me now, sir?”

I see that I am, my palette set with colors; she’s wearing the dark blue velvet dress I asked for, the one with the silver trim.

“Yes, I am. If you please, stand over by the window, in the light. Chin up. Hold your hand so. Higher. Good.”

The underpainting is already done, and this is the final layer. I’m using smalt with calcite on the dress, touches of lapis on the collar and in the folds. I want transparency and speed; I’m working with the paint thinned to a milky liquid, a few back-and-forth swashes of the large brush lays in her face. His Majesty has asked for a group portrait of himself with his family for his private rooms, and I have been thinking about this and working on it for many weeks. He asks me often when it will be finished, and I say, soon, Majesty, and he smiles; I am well known as a phlegmatic, it is a joke of the court.

I paint in the highlights and features of her hideous face, her lank brown hair. I will have another dwarf there and a dog as well. The cuffs, the surface glitter of the gown. That is enough. I put my palette on the table.

“May I see the painting, Don Diego?”

“If you like.”

Maribárbola waddles around the easel and looks up at the canvas. After some minutes, she says, “I have never seen anything like this picture.”

I say, “There is nothing like this picture.”

“No. You have made my face as it might be seen through a misted glass. Why is that?”

“A fancy. I wish to direct the eye toward the center of the painting, and so the figures on the edges are indistinct.”

“Yes, toward the infanta and the meninas. And for another reason too: when we see something ugly we squint our eyes so as to make it blur. Yet you have made Their Majesties the most indistinct of all, there in that dusty mirror. They are ugly as well. Perhaps you have grown tired of painting them. But you know, the true center of the picture is not at all the infanta. It is you, the painter. That’s very clever. It is a clever painting. Do you think His Majesty will like it?”

“He likes all my paintings.”

“Yes. It is unusual that such a stupid man as our king should allow such cleverness in a servant, and him not a freak of nature. Cleverness is suspect in Spain, don’t you think? It suggests Jewish blood.”

“There is no Jew in my line back to the remotest antiquity.”

“Yes, so you are always saying, always, and His Majesty pretends to believe it, and therefore so must we all. You will get your knight’s cross, Don Diego, never fear. You paint the truth cleverly, as we fools speak it, and as I say, our king prizes the truth, but only from such as we.”

“I am not a freak of nature.”

“Oh, but you are, Don Diego, you are; there is no one like you in the world. I am common as bread compared to you. I am the twin sister of the infanta compared to you. However, our masters, being the greater fools, don’t comprehend it, for you have the figure of a man and not a dwarf. I assure you that if you looked like El Primo you might paint just as you do, but you would not be a chamberlain. In fact, El Primo is the cleverest man at court, or near to it, but because his head is only a yard above his feet, no one bothers about what is inside it. If I have your leave, sir, I must go now and entertain the infanta. I will somersault and play tunes upon my whistle, and hope the stupid child, whom may God bless, has not been naughty again, and if she has, that someone other than me will have the whipping. I bid you good day, sir.”

She leaves. I call for my servant, who comes to clean my painting things. I return to my apartments and change my clothes. I meet this morning with contractors and decorators to plan the celebrations for the queen’s name day. It is a weakness of mine to converse seriously with fools. And yet who else is there? One cannot speak to servants of anything consequential, my equals are all rivals, and those above me have nothing to say. If I had a son…but I do not, and my son-in-law, while a perfectly worthy fellow, has neither cultivation nor much talent with the brush. Such is my fate, to be alone in the world.

But I have a son. This was my first thought when I awoke. I have a son. Or do I? Maybe Milo is another fantasy. And Rose, and Lotte. I’ve been painting Las Meninas and talking to Maribárbola, the dwarf in the lower right. That’s as real to me as any memory of my supposed family. And now…there’s always a moment when you wake up, usually brief, when you don’t quite know who you are or where you are, accentuated when you’re traveling, awaking in a strange room and so on, and then whatever brain system brings you up out of unconsciousness reboots and there you are, yourself again.

But not this morning. Or night, because it was dark in the room. I had no idea who I was. There were possibilities, I had those, and I ran through the Rolodex, flipping through. I might be Chaz Wilmot, hack artist, forger of a painting now hailed as one of the great works of Velázquez, hiding out from criminals. I might be Chaz Wilmot, successful New York painter, now insane and under treatment, with a load of false memories, just as false as that conversation with a baroque dwarf. Or I might be Diego Velázquez, caught in a nightmare. Or some combination. Or someone else entirely. Or maybe this was hell itself. How would I tell?

So I just lay there, breathing, trying to control my pounding heart. No point in getting up, no point in any action at all. There are people in mental hospitals with perfectly intact brains and bodies who haven’t made a volitional movement in decades. Now I could see why.

After a while my bladder informed me that it wanted to be emptied. I knew I should get up and find either a seventeenth-century chamber pot or a toilet, but that would mean moving, and that was hard to contemplate. I could see why the people in the locked wards preferred to lie in their own filth all day. You could get used to lying in filth but never to the terror involved in deciding to move in a world that was implacably hostile and alien. Your feet could break off. Why not? Or if you moved, the Eaters could get you, if such monsters featured in your particular madness. Or you could turn into someone else. Best to stay still. I pissed in the bed.

I could see something now, grayness and shapes, a light source very faint. I was in the room in Krebs’s house. Maybe. I could be in China, or in Dr. Zubkoff’s laboratory. It looked like my bedroom at Krebs’s, but looks are deceiving, oh yes. Painters deceive you all the time, or used to.

I didn’t sleep as the daylight penetrated the room. I tried not to think, but thoughts came. Time passed. People came into the room and out again, I was cleaned and put back into a fresh bed. A woman tried to spoon food into my mouth, but I kept my jaws clenched and struck out at her and screamed until some men came in and tied my hands to the bed frame. That was fine with me. I wasn’t going anywhere.

A tapping on the door, or so it seemed. I lay very, very still and hoped it would go away. No, another tap and a voice. It said, “Chaz?” A familiar voice? How could I tell?

Sound of a door opening, and a click and the room was flooded with hideous light-I could see everything! I squirmed down under the covers to hide my face. A weight on the bed next to me, tugging at the quilt, a voice. It was Lotte’s voice, should have been comforting, I missed her so much, or somebody missed her, although it may have been someone else. She wanted me to get up, she pleaded, the children are upset. How long have they been here? I wondered. Are they really here at all?

She exposed my face and I didn’t try to hide it. Best to be completely passive. She looked a lot like Lotte my wife, but her face was blurry, not in focus, like the face of the dwarf in my painting. She touched my face. She said, “Oh, Chaz, what has happened to you?”

I’d like to know that too, I really would.

I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t want to ask her. I didn’t want to know who she’d been married to.

She said, “I have been so worried. Krebs said you had had a relapse, you were incoherent, raving. I came as soon as I could.”

I rummaged around for a while until I found my voice, one that sounded strange in my ears. I said, “I was painting the royal family. I am the greatest painter of the age.”

“Look at me,” she ordered. “You know who I am.”

I said, “You look like Lotte. Is this real?” and I laughed, a horrible sound. Lunatics are always depicted as laughing; we speak of maniacal laughter, and this is why. When the ground of reality is stripped away, when meaning itself takes a walk, what’s left is this monstrous hilarity.

And tears. I wept and she held me, and perhaps the reality of the familiar body, the smell of her hair, her perfume, worked on a brain level below the one that was screwed up so badly, and I calmed a little. She spoke slowly and gently as she often did to the children, about being summoned, about Krebs arranging everything, how he thought the presence of my family would help get me through this crisis.

And into my mind then, in the midst of the most extreme existential terror, came the thought that now my only course was to cleave to the wisdom of the sages and the bumper stickers and simply abandon all memory as unreliable, to discard the past and the future and simply try to exist moment to moment and see what happened. So, whoever this nice woman was, I was not going to ask her to confirm or deny anything about my past or about who Krebs was; I was just going to let her take the lead, and follow.

I said, “My memory is all scrambled.”

“But you remember me, yes? And the children?”

“Yes. How are the kids?”

“Oh, you know, all excited, the plane ride, this place. It’s quite lovely. There’s a little farm attached to it. They were down there all morning, ducks and goats and so on. Did I tell you, I’ve found a marvelous clinic in Geneva for Milo? They think they can really do something for him.”

I said that sounded great, I said I was fine, not to worry. So, I made myself move like one of those robots controlled by a little remote, press one button for out of bed, another for the shower, and so on. I got dressed, greeted the world, and life, of a sort, resumed.

It was my daughter, Rose, who made the difference. I fell upon her with an intensity that amazed both of us, hugs and kisses and foolish talk. I spent unaccustomed hours with her over the next days, I’m not busy anymore, all the time in the world. She was the only person in my life who didn’t think I was crazy, she accepted me at face value, not caring for what the world thought. Could build your life on a kid, many people do, although it’s unfair as hell to the kid-they’re supposed to build on you. We walked through the woodlands, dabbled in streams, did little art projects. She found a shredder somewhere and made a big sheet of collage, the farm and its animals, but didn’t have enough pink for the pigs.

We were much at the farm, always accompanied by Franco. It’s where the Bienekes live, and there are some workers who actually do the farm work, very feudal arrangements hereabouts, the guys actually wearing lederhosen. This time of year we have young animals; Rose is entranced, it’s like her Richard Scarry animal book coming to life. Fine weather, fluffy clouds, a Constable painting, felicity surrounds us, except for our son dying in his room, but here’s the great part of being in the now: it doesn’t matter what’s going to happen or what has happened.

I believe I was as pleasant to others as I have ever been, a little shallow maybe, but no one seemed to mind. Lotte treated me very gently, like a live bomb, or no, more like she’s always treated Milo, like somebody who might disappear at any moment. Milo himself was stiff and formal with me, he’s at the age when insanity in a parent is particularly distressing. For my part, I avoided him as much as I could. I couldn’t bear the expression on his face when he looked at me.

At the farm one morning Rose brought me a little duckling and I was able to focus my full attention on the squirming golden ball, and on my girl’s delight in the duck, and on the day, which seemed to last an amazingly long time, like summer days in childhood. Rose was able to drag me uncomplaining around the farm like a large rolling toy.

We entered the sheep barn. There were young lambs. As we inspected them, I knelt and said softly to my daughter, “Could I ask you a question?”

“Yes. Is this a game?”

“Uh-huh. I’m pretending I don’t know anything and you have to tell me stuff, okay?”

“What stuff?”

“Like what’s my name?”

“It’s Chaz. That’s a shortcut for Charles.”

“Very good! And where do I live?”

“In your loft.”

“And where do you and Mommy and Milo live?”

“In our house. It’s 134 Congress Street, Brooklyn, New York. I know our phone number too.”

I hugged her tight. “I bet you do, honey. Thank you.”

“Is this all of the game?”

“Yes, for now,” I said.

What a wonderful day!

It got better. We had lunch at the farm with the workers, big sweaty blondes who made much of my daughter and wife in German. Rose is bilingual in French and was delighted to discover that there was another language in which people can be sweet to her, and she was able to communicate a little, with Lotte supplying phrases both amusing and useful. Such hearty laughter!

But after lunch it occurred to me that I might have hallucinated Rose’s answers. I was angry with myself for even thinking of such a stupid ploy, and in this mood I slipped down to the kitchen, chatted with the girls and Frau Bonner. They were making cakes, and busy, and I had no problem easing a six-inch chef ’s knife out of a drawer and up my sleeve. It was old and black and the wooden handle was cracked, so they probably don’t use it much and won’t miss it. Still razor sharp, though. It made me feel good to have a weapon. I thought that if I ever figured out who my real enemies were I would use it on them. I tested it on my own wrists too, just scratches. That was also a possibility that came to mind.

That evening we were having dinner with his excellency the evil magician, and we were asked to dress for it. Lotte thought it was a lovely idea, to dress up for dinner. I wore my Venice suit; she fetched out a wonderful sheath dress in a Naples-yellow fabric that sparkled. She looked terrific in the formal dining room too, along with the crystal and the polished mahogany and the silver champagne bucket and Krebs smiling in his white dinner jacket like Reichsmarschal Göring, but not as fat.

A nice dinner too, or would’ve been if I hadn’t had so much to drink. I’d forgotten that booze knocked you out of that state of just being, which is why drunks are always going on about the past and making promises about the future, and why AA is always preaching one day at a time. Anyway, we’d just finished the boar with red cabbage, and Krebs and Lotte were deep in a conversation about what was showing in New York, and Lotte was telling him about Rudolf Stingel, who apparently uses chipped Styrofoam panels and linoleum and industrial carpeting distressed in various ways and hung on the wall to make people forget beauty and really experience the fact that everything is just total shit, and who was having his one-man at the Whitney, and Lotte turned to Krebs and said in a clear voice something about my own one-man show at the Whitney.

Krebs listened affably to this while my blood chilled, and then Lotte looked me right in the eye with a hesitant half smile and said, “It was a wonderful show.”

Yes, my Lotte.

Before anyone could stop me, I jumped up and ran out of the dining room and down the hall to Krebs’s office, where I entered and locked the door behind me. I started searching, I’m not sure for what, some evidence, some physical object that I could use to defend my memories of my life as an impoverished commercial hack, and funny, isn’t it, I hated it while I was living it, but in retrospect it seemed to be the most precious thing in the world; how we love what we take to be our true selves. And so much did I not want to be the painter of those sexy Teflon nudes that I looked for such an item. I looked a little roughly, I have to say; I think I broke some nice things in there. I used my knife on some of Krebs’s possessions.

Keys were rattling in the lock as I ran out through the French windows, around the house, and in through the kitchen door. There was a wall phone there, and I grabbed it and punched in my sister’s number, the number of her organization, surely there’d be someone there who would take an emergency message, get it to her in Africa, please, your brother doesn’t know who he is, could you tell him? But what I heard was “The number you have reached is not a working number, please try again,” which I didn’t have time to do, because they were coming through the house after me, so I ran up the back stairs. I had to find Rose, because she was the only one now, because maybe I’d made up Charlie too. If I could get to Rose and ask her a few questions again I’d be all right.

She was standing in the hallway holding her pink blanket. I dropped to my knees in front of her.

“Rosie! What are you doing out of bed?”

“I was scared, Daddy. I heard people shouting.” Indeed people were shouting, in German. Footsteps pounded below.

“It’s okay, Rose,” I said. “Look, I’m going to take you to bed again, but first I want to play that game again, okay? Just tell me where I live and where you live and I’ll take you to bed and tell you a story and it’ll be all right.”

“I don’t want to, Daddy. I’m scared.”

“Come on, Rosie-where does Daddy live?” I knew it was wrong, just like I knew blowing a grand’s worth of coke a week was wrong, but I’d done that too. I thought. Anyway, I had to hear it, I had to have that information that instant or die.

I can imagine what my face looked like at that moment, because I could see the terror in her eyes. She started to blubber. I grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her. “Tell me, damn it!” I yelled. Rose cried out and I heard Lotte scream behind me, as who would not on seeing a maniac poised over a little girl brandishing a knife? And then I was jerked backward by an arm around my throat and the knife went flying and Franco and one of the Slavs held me down, screaming, and then Krebs came up and yanked down my pants and shot me up with something that switched off my brain.

I came to in a small white room, tied with soft restraints to a hospitel bed, my mouth parched, foul tasting, and dry as old newspapers. I croaked a little and someone must’ve heard me, because a nurse (or someone posing as a nurse) came in and took my pulse and gave me a cup of water and a straw to sip from. She said what I supposed were soothing things in German, and shortly thereafter a brisk young man appeared in my field of view. He had on a white lab coat and those fashionable slit-type black eyeglasses, and he said his name was Schick and that he was the psychiatrist in charge of my case.

I said, “The world is whatever is the case.”

He blinked, then smiled. “Ah, yes, Wittgenstein. Do you study him?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just a bit that floated up.”

“Ah! Well, no matter. Do you know where you are, Mr. Wilmot?”

“A hospital?”

“Yes, it is a small hospital near Ingolstadt, and this is the psychiatric ward. Do you know why you are here?”

“I’m crazy?”

He smiled again. “Well, you have had a breakdown of some kind, delusions and amnesia, and so forth. In such cases, where there is no history and rapid onset, we look for organic causes, and I am happy to tell you that we have found none. You were given a CAT scan while you were unconscious, and your brain is perfectly normal in all respects.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Yes. And could you tell me what is this implant you have? It showed up on the scan.”

“I don’t have an implant.”

“Oh, yes. Very small, at the back of your left arm.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Well, this may be part of your amnesia, yes? In any case we will have it out and then we shall see what is what. Now, tell me, do you know now who you are?”

I didn’t, but I told him the story I thought he wanted to hear, successful painter goes berserk, thinks he’s an unsuccessful painter, and as we talked it suddenly made a lot of sense. What a strange thing to have concocted, I thought then, fantasizing myself as a bitter failure instead of the prosperous painter I clearly was. I felt calmer than I’d been for a long time. They had me on some drug, obviously, and it was working. The implant? Well, I was sure there was some explanation, some necessary medical procedure that had slipped my mind. I hadn’t been myself lately, and so I might have forgotten I’d had it put in. Really, nothing seemed worth getting excited about. When he saw how calm I was he released the restraints. Quite a pleasant talk with Dr. Schick, and then he went away.

I had lunch and a pill and dozed for a while, and a nurse came in and shot some local anesthetic into my arm and did something with an instrument and went away. I asked her if I could see what she took out of me, but I couldn’t make myself understood, or maybe it wasn’t allowed. In a little while I fell asleep again.

When I awakened it was dark, darker than a hospital usually is, and that hospital smell was gone. I rose from my bed and walked out of the room to find myself in a wide hallway, high ceilinged, the walls covered in tapestries, with an occasional large painting. By the dim yellow light from candles set in wall sconces I see there are people there too, guards with helmets and halberds, and men and women dressed in black, with lace collars. None of them pay me any attention. There is a room from which comes the sound of weeping and muttered prayer. I go in and pass through several rooms, all richly furnished and lit with many candles, and at last to a bedroom, and a deathbed. There I see the soon-to-be widow, and the daughter and the son-in-law, and the priests, and those who have come to pay their last respects, and on the high draped bed is the dying man. The air is heavy with the scent of cloves.

I stand at the foot of this bed and stare at the wan, exhausted face, and the man opens his eyes and sees me.

He says, “You! I know you. I’ve dreamed about you in my dreams of hell. Are you a demon?”

“No,” I say, “just a painter like you. And it wasn’t hell you dreamed of, it was the future.”

“Am I dreaming still, then?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps I am dreaming you. No one else here can see me and this is real, at least to you.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Then go away. I am sick.”

“You are dying, Don Diego. This is your last day on earth.”

“Then why are you tormenting me? Leave me in peace!”

“I had no choice in the matter,” I say. “I took a drug that comes from the Indies and the drug brought me to you. I can’t explain it, even though in the future we are more clever about these things than they were in your time. In any case, here I am, and I would like to ask you a question.”

He opens his eyes, waiting.

I say, “What became of the last portrait you painted of Leonora Fortunati, the one with your own portrait in the mirror?”

“You know about that?” he says, and his sunken eyes grow wide.

“I know everything, Don Diego. I know about you chasing the seller of red carnations when you were a child and how the priest brought you home, and how you learned to paint, and your visit to Madrid, when you were rejected, and how you went another time and became the king’s painter and how you felt when he first touched you, and your conversations with Rubens and your voyages to Italy, the first and the second, and I know about Leonora, how you painted her for Heliche and how she taught you about the art of love.”

It is a while before he speaks again, nor am I sure that he speaks at all. Perhaps it is a more subtle communication. “She died,” he says. “The plague struck in Rome and the boy died and she became sick as well and she wrote to me. She said she burnt it. I burnt her letter.”

I say, “This may be so, but the painting lives again. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Well, since I am conversing with a phantom, which is impossible, then I suppose that it is also possible that a burnt painting can come back to life. It was a wicked painting, but a good one. What you saw, however, was a forgery. The woman did not lie, I think, not when she saw the marks of death on her body.”

He pauses, perhaps lost for a moment in memory. Then he says, “You said you were a painter-do they paint, then, in your future?”

“Yes, after a fashion. Not as you did.”

“No one painted as I did, even in my own time. Tell me, do the kings of Spain still keep my paintings and admire them?”

“Yes, they do, and so does all the world. In a few years from now Luca Giordano will stand before your portrait of the royal family and call it the theology of painting. A thousand painters have gone to school before it.”

A faint smile forms on the dry lips. “That Neapolitan boy-how we laughed about him!” He lets out a long sigh and says, “And now, Sir Phantom, I must, as you say, be about the business of dying, and I wish to turn my thoughts to God and away from things that happened long ago, that I regret.”

“But it was a wonderful painting.”

“Yes, wonderful,” he says, and perhaps he does not mean the painting, or not entirely.

I say, “Farewell, Velázquez,” and he says, “Go with God, Sir Phantom, if you are not a devil.”

What to make of this, I thought, lying in my madhouse bed, later on that long night. A vivid dream is the easiest explanation, a kind of tying up of the whole thing, now that I’m officially on the mend. But I sniffed the sleeves of my bathrobe and got a whiff of cloves. Or did I imagine that too? Like my little game with Rose. Did I imagine her giving the failed artist Chaz’s address when I asked her in the barn? I felt so bad about frightening her in the hall at Krebs’s house, but only in a vague and distant way, like it had happened long ago to someone else. It was sweet not to have any of it matter under these wonderful drugs.

I slept then, deep and dreamless, and in the morning when I passed my door on the way to the toilet, I happened to look out the little window, and who should I see but Krebs. He was in deep consultation with Dr. Schick and another man, one whose face I knew well, because I’d drawn a portrait of it in Madrid. Dr. Schick seemed to be explaining something to him, and he was nodding. Well, then, as Krebs suggested, he must be some kind of mental health guy. Although he still had the face of a gangster.

About an hour later, after breakfast, Dr. Schick came in and I had a long session with him. I gave him the life story, and how I felt about painting, and especially about the paintings I was doing, the slick nudes, I meant, and why I should imagine myself an impoverished though principled hack, rather than a wealthy and fashionable painter. He had a lot of good things to say about the fragility of the mind, and how it sometimes cracked under the strain of contrary urges and desires. Not at all unusual, he said, even among highly successful people. I told him about the salvinorin, and he wiggled his eyebrows and said, “Well, no wonder!”

I asked him what was in the implant that they removed, and he said they didn’t know. It was empty.

“What could it have been?” I asked.

“I would have to guess there,” he said, “for of course I have no medical records here for you. But people have had good success with such devices for dispensing antipsychotics. You know, many of those suffering from forms of schizophrenia refuse to take their medications, and this is one way to fix that.”

I agreed that this was a possible explanation, and we chatted some more about controlling my symptoms. He gave me a prescription for more calming drugs and also for Haldol, which he thought I’d do well on, almost an ideal Haldol patient, he said.

I must have been, because a few days later I was discharged. I sat out on a bench in the sun outside the hospital. I was trying to recall painting those Wilmot nudes I’d seen, and the events that went with that life, and you know, it started to come back to me. My shows, mingling with the rich and famous, doing the paintings, and bit by bit I assembled memories of that life. It’s amazing what the mind can do. After a while a Mercedes pulled up on the drive with Franco at the wheel, and I got in and he drove me back to the Krebs establishment.

I did wonder why Lotte hadn’t come to see me at the hospital, but I found that she’d left to bring Milo to his Swiss clinic, taking Rose with her. That was fine by me. It’s embarrassing to be crazy, especially the kind of crazy I was, where you’ve forgotten the life you lived with another person. Were we really still married in this life? I hadn’t asked.

A few days passed. Not a bad existence, I had to admit. Responsibilities were few, one never wanted for company, and I had the run of the place except for Krebs’s office. Time just flowed on by. I did not pick up a brush or a pencil after returning from the nuthouse, but I knew I eventually would, maybe as an outsider artist, like those brilliant schizophrenics who cover acres of paper with their obsessions, or maybe I will cleave more closely to the mainstream and turn my craziness into real money, like van Gogh, and Cornell, and Munch. Or go back to the pricey nudes.

I detected a certain tension in the house. It was because the auction of the Venus had been scheduled in New York. D-day was, I believe, just three days away, and the worlds of art and high finance (is there a difference?) were churning like baskets of eels. I saw a copy of Der Spiegel lying around with the painting spread over the cover, with the blurb stating that the painting would go on the block with a reserve price of a hundred and ten million dollars. I didn’t get a chance to read the article. They restricted my access to media: doctor’s orders.

Later that day, Kellermann handed me a cell phone, and it was Lotte from Geneva. She said the special rich-people clinic had poked Milo and examined his insides and declared that yeah, they can make him good as new for about a million bucks, more or less; a few new organs required, but it turns out that for these we don’t have to go on no stinkin’ list, they’re ready more or less when we are. Milo does look a little less peaky, she says. Maybe it’s the hope.

To her great credit, Lotte asked about the source of the putative organs, and the man didn’t quite get why she was asking. She said she didn’t want them to, like, come from people especially murdered to provide them, and the guy was shocked she would have thought such a thing, this being Switzerland and very correct. No, they have deals with people in high-risk professions, money up front and we get your good parts when the parachute doesn’t open, and also they’ll pay for the education of a cohort of kids, and should they drown some summer, the families let them take a cut, so to speak. Very rational and actuarial, something like dairy farming, ever a Swiss specialty. Whether it’s legal in the strict sense she didn’t ask.

I had a discussion with Krebs about the money end of this plan. It seemed that a million dollars was at that moment sitting in a Swiss account for me, in payment of all the paintings he’d sold from my vast output, which he’d been representing for years. Sorry you don’t recall that, Wilmot, sorry you recall something that didn’t happen and sorry you don’t recall something that did, but, hey, you’re crazy! I took this in calmly, or the Haldol did. The fact is, I can’t help liking him and I think he genuinely likes me.

That evening I wandered into the room Rose had occupied, wondering when I’d get to see the kids again, if ever, and I saw, taped to the wall, one of her shredder-strip pasteups. It was of two fat piggies in a green field. Clearly she’d found a supply of pink. Well, you know, I really have a good eye for color, and a very good memory for color, if not for much else, and something about the strips of pink paper she was using to construct the pigs made a connection in my head: many of her strips had on them small sections of an intense rose madder.

I poked around the room, looking for the source, and after a while I found it, stuck in the back of a bureau drawer, a clear plastic bag full of shredder waste, mainly pink. I took it back to my room and dumped the strips onto the floor. I was lucky that it was a strip shredder and not the confetti kind, because you can do a pretty good job of reconstruction on that kind of strip. After the Iranian students took over the Tehran embassy back in ’79 they had teams of women reconstruct a lot of CIA secrets from the shredder waste, and I sat there all night and did the same thing, using a glue stick. It wasn’t perfect when I got through, but you could see what it was.

When I was done I sat through the dawn and the early morning thinking about what had been done to me, and also about why I wasn’t angrier. I wasn’t really angry at all, just sad. Relieved? A little, but mainly sad. How could she have? But I knew the answer to that.

There was a little stone terrace on the east side of the house, with a table and an umbrella set up on it, and there Krebs liked to take his breakfast alone, read half a dozen newspapers, and, I suppose, plot his next crimes. No one is supposed to interrupt him there, but I figured this was a special occasion.

I walked out into the early sunlight and held my pasteup in front of his face.

He looked at it for a moment, sighed, and said, “That Liesl! Honestly, she has been told a hundred times to attend to the burn bags before she does anything else.”

He gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Wilmot. Tell me, what do you think you have there?”

I said, “I have there a Photoshop printout of an unfinished fake painting I last saw in a loft I was supposedly living in on Greenwich Street in New York. I was so rattled that I didn’t look at it closely enough, or I would have seen it was a huge ink-jet image printed onto canvas, then artfully gone over with a brush, and then glazed. I assume the images in that phony gallery were made in the same way.”

He didn’t say anything, just sat there with an amused look on his face.

I said, “The gallery, and the loft, and changing my door and my locks, and that ringer in Bosco’s place. And you got to Lotte too. It’s…I don’t know what to call it-insane? And how did you know the drug would affect me in that way? I mean the Velázquez connection. You couldn’t have planned it.”

He said nothing.

“No, of course not,” I continued. “It was just taking advantage of a preexisting fact. I was hallucinating Velázquez, and those paintings I did proved I had the skill. So of course, you had to forge a Velázquez.”

“Go on. This is fascinating.”

“And you implanted that slow-release thing in me so I’d keep having the experience even after I wasn’t getting the drug from Shelly.”

“It could certainly have been done that way, yes. Low-level American health care personnel are shockingly ill paid. It could have been done in that mental hospital in New York.”

“Zubkoff was in on it too.”

“I think you will find him perfectly innocent. If such a series of events actually transpired, then Mark Slade would have had to have been the instigator of the whole New York endeavor. You should be more careful about your confidantes in future.”

“But why? Why did you go through all that incredible trouble and expense?”

“Well, if I were to humor you in this conjecture,” he said, “I would have to say it was because of what happened to Jackie Moreau.”

The name came as a shock. “He’s dead,” I said inanely.

“Yes. Murdered. He did a very nice Pissarro for us, and a Monet. And he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. I tried to protect him, but I was overruled. So I was not going to take a chance with you. Because in something like this, as I have tried to explain to you, the forger always talks in the end, forgers can’t help it. And the people who deal in forgeries at this level understand that. But no one listens to a madman. I believe your madness has saved your life.”

“And you thought driving me crazy was the solution? Why in hell didn’t you come to me like a man and tell me the straight story and ask me to pretend to be crazy?”

He shook his head. “Assuming for a moment that you are right, no such imposture would have worked. You are an artist, not an actor. Do you imagine that the gentleman who asked you to draw him that day in Madrid would be taken in for a moment by an imposture? No, you had to be genuinely mad, mad before witnesses, certified mad by doctors of unimpeachable reputation. And mad you must remain for all your days, if you want to live.”

“That was why that guy was talking to Schick in the hospital,” I said. “He was checking up that I was really around the bend.”

He shrugged. “If you like.”

“So you’re agreeing I’m not a succesful gallery painter and that I did paint that fake Velázquez?”

“I’m not agreeing to anything of the sort. Wait here a moment and I’ll show you something.”

He got up and left me staring at his empty chair. After a short while he returned, holding what looked like a leather-bound photo album. He handed it to me and I opened it. Every right-hand page held a color photograph of a painting affixed to the thick black paper with old-fashioned corner mounts, and on each facing page was pasted a typed provenance, in German. There were twenty-eight in all: several Rembrandts, a Vermeer, two Franz Hals, and the rest good-quality Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, with two exceptions. One was a Breughel of a skating party on a canal, and the other was the van der Goes altarpiece I’d seen in Krebs’s office that time. Besides that, all of them were unfamiliar to me.

“What is this?” I asked him.

“Well, you’ll recall the story I told you of the van that was consumed in Dresden. These were the paintings in that van.”

“Except for the van der Goes.”

“Yes, that had been removed and placed in the other van for reasons now obscure. But these paintings in the album are assuredly gone. Now, you may have noticed during your tour of this house a small door in the cellar that is always locked. Behind it is a bricked-up well. It was bricked up in 1948. Now, suppose I wished to remove the bricks for some reason and hired a respectable firm of builders to do the job, and suppose that behind the bricks we found all these paintings. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”

It took me a few seconds to get it, and it was so absurd that I had to laugh. “You want me to forge twenty-seven paintings.”

He laughed too. “Yes. Marvelous, isn’t it?”

“But you’d never be able to sell them. The Schloss family and the international authorities-”

He waved his hand. “No, no, not a public sale. I’ve explained this to you. There is an immense private market for high-value paintings. To dispose of these would be quite easy, once news of the discovery was made available to a particular subset of the market. People have been wondering about the lost Schloss paintings since the war, and of course it is known that my father had access to them. They would sell like pancakes.”

“That’s an interesting offer,” I said.

“Isn’t it? And of course it would more than fund your own work and any expenses you might have in connection with your son’s treatment.”

“Yes, that,” I said, and thought of Lotte and my old pal Mark, and how they’d both contributed to the plot. I said, “I’m curious. How did you rope Mark and Lotte into this thing?”

“Speaking hypothetically, you mean?”

“If it makes you happy.”

“Then it was money, of course. Mark will realize a colossal commission from the Velázquez. And he does not seem to like you very much. He was quite gleeful to be, as he put it, fucking with your head.”

“And Lotte. Doesn’t she like me either?”

“On the contrary, she loves you very much. She agreed to help us so as to blast you forever out of your ridiculous and miserable existence as a commercial artist and also to obtain adequate medical care for your son, which you were never going to be able to do. There is no deeper love than this, you know, than to surrender the loved one so that he can become what he was meant to be.”

“I was meant to be an insane forger?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, Wilmot. Yes, you are insane, as planned. I mean to say, you imagine you are Diego Velázquez! What could be more clear evidence of madness than that? It is textbook diagnosis. You have long fits of amnesia during which you believe you have painted old masters. And so forth.”

For a long moment I stared at him, literally gaping. It was like a movie, a bad melodrama in which the villain explains to the helpless James Bond how he’s going to blow up the city. But Krebs wasn’t looking villainous at all, no malicious glee, just a concerned and paternal expression like Dad has when he breaks it to little Virginia that there’s no Santa.

There was no juice of outrage in me. I managed to say, “That’s pretty fucking arrogant, Krebs, to do that to someone, don’t you think?”

“Well, yes, I am an arrogant bastard. It is my nature and of course our national vice as well. But consider, Wilmot, that you have always been crazy, and with no help from me. When we started this you were a neurotically constricted artist incapable of doing decent work and slaving for workman’s wages producing shit for advertising or whatever. For an artist of your capability, that is the true insanity. Now, on the other hand, you have money and freedom to do what you like.”

“As long as what I like is forging paintings for you.”

“It will not take up too much of your time, I think. You no longer have the excuse of having to struggle to support your family, and you will have to face the white canvas without that crutch. You can paint for yourself. Perhaps you will flourish as never before, and perhaps not. I hope for the former, of course. Maybe you will be the one to rescue easel painting for another thousand years.”

“Oh, yeah, lay that on me!” I said, and then we both smiled. I couldn’t help it.

“And another thing,” he said. “I think that also in your heart of hearts you do not despise this idea of forgery. You wished to add beauty to the world, and the art establishment has no taste for it anymore; this is a way to do it and also to give them one in the eye. And this is my desire too. The Schloss paintings, which were destroyed through my father’s doing and the wickedness of my country, will live again. And no one will ever know the difference.”

“You could give them back to the Schloss family.”

“I could. And perhaps I will-some of them. But, you know, I have my expenses, and patronage is a costly proposition. I must keep Charles Wilmot happy, after all.”

“You must. I notice you’ve abandoned the pretense that I was a successful figurative painter with a Whitney retrospective.”

“I haven’t abandoned anything,” he said. “It’s you who are unfortunately incapable of keeping your story straight, or even of recalling what has been said to you from one minute to the next. For example, I have no idea what you think we have just been discussing. I myself recall a conversation about the watercolors of Winslow Homer.”

I stared at him for a second, and then I had to laugh; it just came bubbling up from inside me and it went on for a long time. He was absolutely right. We might have been discussing anything. My clever pasteup might not even exist. In fact, after I had finished wiping my eyes and caught my breath, I found that it had somehow vanished from the table. And where was that tiny implant? Who knew?

“I am happy you are amused,” he said, and I thought he was just a little uneasy when he said it. I mean, he wanted me crazy, but not that crazy.

“Yeah, now I know why they always depict madmen as laughing. You know, Werner, this is a pleasant spot, but I think I’ll take my lunatic ass back to New York. Unless I’m still a prisoner.”

“You’ve never been a prisoner, except of yourself. What will you do in New York?”

“Oh, you know, tie up my affairs. Take a look at that painting you say I didn’t do.”

“You didn’t. Salinas discovered the lost Velázquez in the bowels of the Alba’s vast holdings, don’t ask me how. All of Mark’s machinations with it were merely to help Salinas smuggle it out of Spain. It truly had a fake Bassano painted on top of it. Perhaps Leonora Fortunati herself had this done to protect herself and her famous lover. As you have yourself described to me.”

“It makes a good story anyway. Werner, don’t you ever tell the truth?”

“I always tell the truth, after a fashion,” he said, and stood and shook my hand. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and walked back into the house.

The next day Franco drove me to Munich, and I caught a flight out to London and then to New York. I checked into the midtown Hilton and called Mark, and we had a nice chat, with no mention of the various betrayals he’d engineered, although he did seem a little nervous on the line. He invited me to his celebration and mentioned in passing that you’d be there, and I accepted.

After I stop talking I’m going to download all the sound files you’ve just heard onto a CD and go to Mark’s party and hand this CD to you. Why you? I don’t know, you’ve always seemed a kind of neutral observer to me, and I’m curious about what you make of it. Maybe there’s some clue you could point me at that’ll make more sense of the whole affair than I could. You might want to study the painting too, if you can get close enough. You might find it particularly interesting.

It was four in the morning when I finished playing the last file, and then I fell into bed half dressed and slept until almost noon, slept right through the alarm and the buzzing on my cell phone, my secretary going a little batty trying to reach me. I called the front desk, but no Chaz Wilmot had shown up or called, which I thought odd. I thought the whole point of the CD was to meet and discuss it. When I checked my messages there was one from Mark Slade inviting me to attend the auction that afternoon and asking me if I’d heard anything from Chaz.

I’d planned to go back to Stamford, I had a meeting at one, but I called the office and had it rescheduled-I was still somewhat under the spell of Chaz’s weird tale and didn’t feel up to discussing the details of theme park reinsurance. I screwed around for a few hours, making some calls and trying to do paperwork and e-mails and such, to no great effect, and then I cleaned myself up, dressed, and caught a cab uptown to Sotheby’s.

I wasn’t in the room for more than a few minutes before Mark pulled himself away from a group of prosperous-looking gentlemen and steered me to a corner. He was full of himself that day, and full of the prospect of the killing he was going to make. The billionaire boys’ club was there in strength apparently, from Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, because this was a unique chance to snag a Velázquez. The last painting by the artist to go on sale had been the Juan de Pareja portrait that the Met had bought at Christie’s in 1970 for four and a half million, and there would not be another in the foreseeable future. I asked him whether the Met would get this one too, and he said not a chance, it’s way out of their range now. Who then? He pointed to a woman wearing a severe gray suit standing in the rear of the room by the phones that off-site bidders used to communicate with their agents at the auction. She had black hair parted in the middle and done up in a bun, scarlet lipstick, and nail polish the same color. Olive skin. Green eyes. That’s Spain, Mark said.

“You mean the Prado?”

“No, I mean the fucking kingdom of Spain. You should watch her on the phone.”

And then he turned the conversation to Chaz and asked me again if I’d spoken to him at the party, and I said I had, and he asked me right out if Chaz had claimed to have painted the Velázquez, and I said yeah, he had. I didn’t mention the CD. Mark said he was afraid of that, poor bastard. You know he had a nervous breakdown? I said I hadn’t heard but that he had seemed a little flaky. A little! Mark said, the guy’s a refugee from the funny farm, I wonder why they let him walk around, and he went on to tell me the story of how he had gotten Chaz this commission in Europe and how he’d gone off the rails there and started accusing people of drugging him, and how he thought he could travel back through time and be Velázquez and paint his works, including this one, and that he’d blanked out big chunks of his real life. I said that was awful, and he said, yeah, but it’s going to do wonders for his sales, if he’d produce something; people love crazy artist stories, look at Pollock, look at Munch, look at van Gogh.

So that was Mark’s tale, and after he’d delivered it, he dropped me in favor of a couple of guys in suits and spade beards who looked like sons of the desert, and I went to sit down. The auction started with half a dozen teaser items, which went quickly, and then the boys in white gloves rolled out the Velázquez, and there was a stir. The auctioneer said this is the Venus with Self-Portrait by Diego Velázquez, also called the Alba Venus, and he said a little about its history and then announced that the bidding would start at one hundred million. There were four serious bidders as the bids raced up the ladder in half-million-dollar jumps, and after each round the auctioneer looked to the back of the room and got a nod from the lady of Spain, and then one by one the others dropped out and the Prado had it for 210 million, the highest price ever recorded for a single painting. Thus the barons of our age learned the lesson that the kings of the age of Velázquez had taught their own barons-it doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t compete with the sovereign, and what we were seeing here was Spain herself bringing back her purloined treasure. No one else had ever had a chance.

What was that, two, two and a half years ago? During that time Chaz Wilmot dropped completely out of sight. I’d always thought it would’ve taken a nuclear detonation to get him out of that loft, but apparently he’d cleaned out whatever he wanted and walked away from the rest. This I got from the girl at Lotte Rothschild’s gallery. Lotte was still in business, doing rather better than before, to judge from her prices. I didn’t stick around to see her. Well, I thought then, bye-bye Chaz, not that he was ever a very important part of my life. I figured he was being maintained in some Swiss clinic.

But it happened that I was called to Barcelona for a meeting with a European consortium building a gigantic amusement park near that city. I had one meeting that lasted all day, and the one scheduled for the next day was moved to the following day in Madrid, so I got a free day in the town, which is one of my favorite cities, as lovely as Paris, but without the attitude. The Catalans even like Americans, probably because the Spaniards don’t very much nowadays. It was a pretty day, warm but not hot, with a breeze that blew away the usual smog, so I took a cab up to Parc Güell to wander through the mosaics, sit on the terrace, and ogle the tourists ogling Gaudí.

And there, on the middle path, among the line of Africans selling cheap sunglasses, crafts, and souvenirs, was a fellow with an easel doing aquarelle portraits of tourists at ten euros a pop. I thought that was a pretty good deal, so I waited my turn and sat down on the little chair provided. The artist, in a straw hat and sunglasses, was darkly tanned and wore a bushy gray-flecked beard. He got right to work without a word. It took about ten or twelve minutes and then he snapped it off his easel and handed it to me.

There I was in all my stony glory. He’d put me in the clothing of a Spanish grandee of the seventeenth century, just like Velázquez used to do, and just as good as the one he’d done of me twenty-five years before.

I said, “Let’s get a drink, Chaz,” and he grinned at me, a little sheepishly, I thought, and asked one of the Africans to watch his stuff. We went over to that little café they have there and sat under a beer-company umbrella.

He said, “You weren’t looking for me, by any chance?”

I said, “No, it was just luck. Why, are you in hiding?”

We ordered claras, and when the waiter left he said, “Not really. It’s just I like to stay kind of private.”

“Well, you’ve succeeded,” I said. “So what’ve you been doing all this time? Sidewalk portraits for ten euros?”

“Among other things. What do you think of your portrait?”

I studied it again. “It’s terrific. Full of life. More of me than I like to see revealed, frankly. And incredible that you can work in watercolors instead of pastels like the other sidewalk guys. Do your customers appreciate this kind of work?”

“Some do. Some really do. And a small percentage think they’re crap, not pretty enough.”

“Just like real life,” I said. “But you can’t possibly make a living from this.”

“No. I have other sources of income.” Our drinks came, and Chaz engaged in some rapid-fire repartee in Spanish with the waiter that I didn’t get. The man laughed and went away.

“Then why do it?” I asked.

“I enjoy it. It’s perfectly non-commoditized art, anonymous, and a pure gift of pleasure to those who can see, and even those who can’t see might come to appreciate their portraits after a while. Artists used to live like that in Europe all the time, back in the Middle Ages. Besides that, I have a studio. I paint a lot.”

“What do you paint?”

He grinned a sly grin. “Oh, you know, slick, witty nudes, just like before. It’s amusing. And I do other stuff too.”

The tone here was purposely vague, and I rose to the bait.

“You’re working for Krebs,” I said. “You’re putting together that collection that got burned in Dresden.”

“I might be. Although you can’t really trust anything I say. I mean, I’m a crazy person doing sidewalk portraits for small change.”

“But you’re not crazy. You proved that. The whole thing was a scam.”

“Was it? Maybe I made that up too.”

“Yeah, but come on, Chaz. Hundreds of people knew you, there are records, tax returns…I mean, you may have had some issues with memory, but you also had a verifiable life.”

“No!” he said with some heat. “No one has a verifiable life. A little lump in your brain growing in the wrong place and you’re not you anymore, and all the records in the world won’t change that. If you can’t trust your memory-and I can’t-then the record of your life, the witness of others, is meaningless. If I presented you with a shitload of records and the testimony of dozens of people telling you that you were, I don’t know, a plumber from Arkansas, would you believe it? If your supposed wife Lulubelle and your five kids swore on a stack of Bibles that you were Elmer Gudge of Texarkana, would you say, gosh, well, I had a fantasy that I was an insurance guy from Connecticut, but that’s all over now, hand me my pipe wrench? Of course you wouldn’t, because your memory’s intact. But what if your memory became unreliable, and what if your actual wife, say, looked at you and went, who’s he?”

This line of talk was making me uncomfortable, so I said, “That must’ve been tough, Lotte shafting you like that. I assume you don’t see her anymore.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Well, she betrayed you, didn’t she? She must have been involved in the scam from the beginning, supplying photos and whatnot, and she betrayed you to your face, just before you went berserk. Unless you’ve forgiven her.”

“There was nothing to forgive, and she didn’t betray me. I betrayed myself. She just made me see it. I’m sort of grateful to her for that. And if I don’t see much of her, it’s not because of what she did-it’s the shame.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how you look through a kaleidoscope and you tap it, and the same little pieces of glass snap into a completely different pattern? That’s what happened. I left Mark’s party that night and took a cab to my loft. And when I went in it was like an alien place, and full of horrible vibes, like an ancient tomb with evil spirits inhabiting it, and even though I’d lived there and worked there for years, it was like I was there for the first time. I couldn’t find stuff, I didn’t recognize the things that were there, as if another me had been there all those years. And I started to freak out bad, and then this revelation-the kaleidoscope clicked, and I saw it. I saw that there was really no difference at all between me and Suzanne.”

He stared at me in a way that seemed to require a response, so I said, “That’s ridiculous. Her problem is she has no talent and wants to be recognized. You have a lot of talent.”

He said, “Yeah, you don’t get it either. It’s the same fucking thing! Having talent and not putting it on the line is just like not having it and desperately wanting to be recognized. It’s the same kind of pathetic. It’s not noble. It’s not elevated to use the techniques of Velázquez on a perfume ad and laugh secretly at the customer for not catching the nuances. It’s a life made of shit, and I’m positively grateful to Lotte and Krebs for getting me out of it.”

“By making you crazy.”

“No, just crazy in a different way,” he said, and smiled the smile of a contented man.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I don’t buy it,” I said after a bit. “I can’t understand why you didn’t just call your sister. Surely she would’ve blown the whole plot to pieces.”

“Oh, right, Charlie. Yes, sure, but Charlie was nowhere to be found during the period in question. Some anonymous donor gave her a bunch of money to set up a field hospital in Chad, immediate departure a requirement, and you’ll recall I didn’t have a phone. She was incommunicado for six weeks, and so when I called her the night I went berserk I got a no-such-number message, although there should have been people at her organization. For a while I thought I’d made her up too.”

“You were using Krebs’s phone. Maybe they messed with it somehow.”

“Yes, and they arranged for Charlie to be gone, and everything else that drove me nuts. A secretive international organization with tentacles everywhere. Don’t you realize how crazy that sounds?”

It did sound crazy, so I changed the subject. “So Charlie’s back from there?”

“Oh, yeah. In fact she lives with me in…wherever I live. She’s in and out on missions of mercy, but we have a nice setup.”

“Just like your boyhood dream.”

“Just.” Again, that annoying smile.

“And Milo? I presume he survived.”

“Yeah. He had his transplant, he’s flourishing. A teenager, which we never thought we’d see. The fruits of my wickedness.”

“Speaking of which, did you ever figure out if you did that Velázquez Venus?”

“Does it matter? You’ve got all the information. What do you think?”

“What I think is that you’re a terrific painter, but you’re not Velázquez.”

This was a little cruel, I admit, but something about how this had all turned out irritated me. It was like when someone accosts you on the street with a problem and you start to respond in a civilized way, to be of service, let’s say, and after a few minutes you pick up that the fellow is crazy and you feel like you’ve wasted your time and your concern.

“You’re right, I’m not,” he said. “But did you ever get a chance to take a close look at it? The real thing, I mean, not the poster.”

“No, but I’ll be in Madrid tomorrow. I intend to see it then. And I assume you haven’t had anymore whatever you call them-visions. Where you think you’re him.”

“No,” he said, with a tone of regret in his voice, “not since I saw him die. I seem to have enough trouble keeping up with me.”

“And you have no interest in finding out the truth?”

“‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.’ You must remember that from Humanities 102. Bacon’s On Truth? Look around you, my friend. Truth has left the building. Everything is manipulable now, even photography, and art is a lie to begin with. Picasso said so, and so say I. We all tell lies, even the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, even in the intimate depths of our private thoughts. But somehow, I don’t know how, maybe through what my sister calls grace, these lies occasionally produce something we all recognize as true. And when I paint I wait for those miracles.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and the conversation subsequently ran down a little. We talked about other things, the cities of Europe and what was going on in the world, and we parted amicably enough.

The next day I was in Madrid and spent the morning in a meeting discussing how to assess the risks of terrorism and sabotage on the proposed amusement venue, which is a growth area among the actuarial set, and I had lunch with my colleagues, then walked over to the Prado. They’d placed it in Room Twelve on the wall to the right of Las Meninas, which was quite the compliment, I thought; not many paintings can stand the comparison.

A little throng had gathered around the Most Expensive Painting in the World, the irresistible tugs of sex and money working together there, and a guard was standing by to make sure people didn’t stay too long and hog the view. I waited until it was my turn, and as I got to the front I was conscious of the little sighs people were making, as if to say, ah, if only love could be like that, sex could be like that, always. There she lay, obviously the same model who had posed for the Rokeby Venus, except now she lay on her back, with her hand covering her crotch, not palm-down, modestly, but palm-up, a joke, offering it, not to us, but to the sweat-soaked man reflected in the black-framed mirror, the same fellow you could see with his palette in hand in the center of the great painting to the left.

You know, I think every man with some experience at love has in his heart the image of the girl who got away, the one who pops into your mind at idle moments, about whom the inevitable longing centers, no matter how content you are with spouse and home. That was the appeal of this painting, I thought; he’d painted, in some wonderful and mysterious way, That Girl. But in my own case, literally, because when I finally got a chance to see the Alba Venus close up I saw that the body the artist had painted was one I’d known intimately, but too fleetingly, some decades ago. I remember in particular a small black beauty mark just below the navel, to the right of the midline. I only got to see it on two occasions, unfortunately, before my old pal Chaz Wilmot swept into that reunion party and yanked Lotte Rothschild out of my life.

Probably for the best, actually; Diana is a much more suitable wife for someone like me. And maybe I am confabulating this too in my mind, a mere black dot-who could recall its exact placement after all these years? Although it’s the kind of thing Chaz would do, the sly bastard.

And then I had to move on, and I circled around behind the crowd and stood for a moment in front of the greatest painting in the world, The Maids of Honor by Velázquez, and thought about what it would be like to be him, really be him, and I couldn’t deal with it, and I left and reentered the long, gray sanity of my life.