Feint of Art: Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  The Glamorous Life

  My studio specialized in fake—sorry, faux—finishes. I was a natural. I made new surfaces look old, wood look like marble, and plaster look like wood. Gradually I branched out into murals, portraits, and even antique reproductions, always taking pains to ensure they could not possibly be passed off as Old Masters. Now, at the age of thirty-one, I was the owner of a reasonably successful business, meaning that most months I brought in enough to support myself and to pay my assistant, Mary. It wasn’t a lot, but I managed to keep my head above water.

  As long as I dog-paddled furiously.

  People loved to think of the art world as a mysterious and potentially dangerous milieu. The artistic life was fulfilling, exciting, and a whole lot of fun, but in my experience, at least, it was distinguished less by drama than by long hours, low pay, and plenty of grunt work. Provided, of course, that I stayed away from my grandfather’s world of fakes, frauds, and felons.

  But despite my best efforts, that world had a way of sneaking up and biting me in the butt when I least expected it. . . .

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19844-5

  First Printing, January 2006

  Copyright © Julie Goodson-Lawes and Carolyn Lawes, 2006

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK–MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  To Mom and Dad

  whose sage and practical advice to pursue careers in the

  computer industry produced an artist, a historian,

  and an art historian.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Mary Ann Roby of A-1 Editing Service, who helped to whip this baby into shape; to Kristin Lindstrom of Lindstrom Literary Group, for taking a chance on the unknown Hailey Lind; and to Martha Bushko of NAL/Signet, for her faith in art and for making it all happen.

  Thanks as well to John, whose Medici-like patronage has made the artistic life possible for more than a few; to Jorge, Candida, Susan, Sandra, Karin, Steve, and Karen, for their thoughtful critiques and unflagging support; to J.C., for always believing, and for a lot of good scotch; to Shay and Suzanne, for food, friendship, and getting married; to Mary for being Mary; to Anna, for refusing to buy another book until this one was published; to the entire MVSC, for uncommon neighborliness . . . and above all to Malcolm and Sergio, for all the joy.

  Prologue

  “Georges, please—try to concentrate on what I’m saying,” I persisted. “It is illegal and immoral to forge art.”

  “Ah, but my agent assures me that there’s no law against writing a book about forging art, cherie. As to whether it is immoral, well . . .”

  “You already have an agent?” I asked, momentarily distracted from my halfhearted moral outrage.

  “But of course, Annie! It is a wonder, this book. It is the ultimate tool for the democratization of art, a way for me to spread the joys of . . .”

  I stopped listening out of an instinct for self-preservation. Georges was spreading something, all right, but it sure wasn’t joy. My hand tightened around the telephone as my mind reeled at what this might mean for me. For the past several years I had been working like a dog to establish myself as a legitimate artist and faux finisher in San Francisco, determined to distance myself from my grandfather Georges LeFleur’s world of art felons, forgers, and fakes.

  And now he was writing a “memoir” that would no doubt include so many professional secrets, not to mention scores of recipes for committing art fraud, that it might as well be a required textbook for “Forgery 101.” In certain circles, what Grandfather was proposing was roughly akin to publishing instructions for how to build an atomic bomb using common household cleaners.

  I was his beloved granddaughter.

  I was trying to talk him out of it.

  I didn’t stand a chance.

  “Answer me this, cherie. Just this one question, and I will agree not to publish this wonderful tome.”

  I perked up.

  “Why should a painting that is considered exquisite on Monday, and is revealed as a fake on Tuesday, be reviled on Wednesday? Tell me: how has the painting changed? Is it any less beautiful? Any less a work of art?”

  I sat back, deflated. I didn’t know. That was a big part of my problem. In addition to inheriting my grandfather’s artistic talent, I had also developed a tendency toward moral flexibility—at least when it came to art. I tried to stifle it, but it wasn’t easy. Fighting genetics never was.

  According to family lore, at the age of eighteen months I had toddled across the room, plucked the paintbrush from my grandfather’s hand, and corrected the shading on a “Renoir” that Georges was painting for a financially strapped German baroness who had been forced to quietly sell the original.

  At the age
of ten, I won a California state Masters of Tomorrow competition with a brilliant copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, was proclaimed a prodigy, and had my painting hung with great fanfare in the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento. When the artist is ten, the ability to paint a fake is considered adorable.

  At the age of sixteen, I waged a three-month-long campaign to convince my skeptical parents to allow me to spend the summer in Paris with Georges, who insisted that arthritis had long since forced him to give up his life of crime. No, no, he swore, he would simply teach me French.

  Grandfather was a man of his word about the language, if not the life of crime. I learned to say “I am afraid you are mistaken, good sir,” “I am just a tourist,” and “I must insist upon calling my attorney” in French as well as in five other European languages, plus Cantonese.

  Most of what I actually learned, though, was how to forge art, as the only thing arthritic about Grandfather was his moral compass. By the end of that summer Georges and I had managed to flood the European art world with our forged sketches, temporarily causing a brief but devastating crash in the market for Old Master drawings.

  The eve of my seventeenth birthday was spent in a dank Parisian jail, where those French phrases had come in handy. And where I vowed, as God was my witness, never to listen to my grandfather again.

  “Allô, Annie? Are you there? What is your answer, cherie?”

  I sighed.

  “The only thing I know for sure, Grandfather, is this: genuine art is priceless and forgery gets you arrested. And that’s enough of a difference for me.”

  It wasn’t much of a comeback, but it was the best I had.

  Chapter 1

  The clever art forger has one decided advantage in any sticky legal situation: collectors, dealers, and museums do not wish to advertise their gullibility.

  —Georges LeFleur, “Gentleman’s

  Disagreement,” unfinished manuscript,

  Reflections of a World-Class Art Forger

  Our eyes met. I tried to keep a poker face. I failed.

  “Ah, hell,” Ernst swore softly.

  “So don’t tell anyone it’s a fake. Who would know?” My voice echoed in the nearly empty vault.

  “I will not be party to a fraud,” he snapped. There was a sheen developing on Ernst’s elegant brow, which I noted with guilty pleasure. It was kind of fun to see an ex-boyfriend sweat. Especially one who had dumped me so unceremoniously.

  “Besides,” Ernst added, “you knew.”

  “I could be wrong,” I lied.

  He shook his head and sighed. “You’re never wrong about forgery. I had my doubts anyway. That’s why I asked you to meet me here tonight.”

  That’s why he begged me to meet him at the Brock Museum in the middle of the night, to be more precise. I wasn’t exactly welcome during regular business hours.

  “In that case, I suggest you keep my name out of it when you go to the board. It won’t help your case if I’m associated with this,” I said, turning my attention back to the exquisite fake of Caravaggio’s The Magi. I had to bite my tongue to refrain from praising the forger’s skill in capturing the artist’s unique blend of dramatic shading and rich, almost luminous colors. Upstanding art types usually found it hard to appreciate this kind of talent.

  And Ernst Pettigrew was as upstanding as they came. The glamour boy of museum curators, Ernst had twinkling blue eyes, a charming European accent, and a sleek BMW convertible. As nurturing of the fine art in his care as he was of the egos of wealthy benefactors, he had won the coveted position of head curator at San Francisco’s Brock Museum last year at the tender age of thirty-five.

  Ernst and I enjoyed a brief fling six years ago, when I was happily working as one of the Brock’s lowly, underpaid restoration interns and he had just arrived from Austria to catalogue the museum’s substantial European art collection. He had broken off our nascent affair when I was “outed” by an old rival as having once been accused of art forgery. My assurances that the charges had been settled out of court placated no one at the Brock, including Ernst. Although I’d been upset by Ernst’s lack of faith, what hurt the most was his public denunciation of me over a mediocre Waldorf salad and a watery iced tea at the annual Brock Frock Talk fashion show fund-raiser.

  One does not know true humiliation until one has been shunned by the Ladies Who Lunch.

  Ernst was now living in a plush condo in the Marina and dating an emaciated model named Quiana. I knew this because in moments of weakness and self-loathing, I read the San Francisco Chronicle’s society pages.

  Now my damning assessment of the “Caravaggio” resting on the easel before me might well mean that Ernst’s career was finished. No matter how you looked at it, fifteen million dollars was a lot of money to spend on a fake. And knowing the way museums such as the Brock reacted to these kinds of expensive mistakes, I was certain Ernst’s vilification would be even more public than my own. I didn’t wish that kind of professional humiliation on anyone, scummy ex-boyfriend or not.

  “You could try to spread the blame,” I suggested. “Didn’t Sebastian run the usual tests to authenticate the age of the canvas and types of paint used?” Dr. Sebastian Pitts was the overrated and undertalented art authenticator who had ruined my chances in the legitimate art restoration field by digging up those old forgery charges. I would happily help Ernst feed Pitts to the Brock lions.

  Nodding distractedly, Ernst walked out of the vault, past a long bank of archival storage drawers, and wordlessly smashed his fist through the wall.

  I gawked at the gaping hole, impressed by both his temper and his strength.

  “Who painted it?” Ernst demanded, the color mounting in his face as he struggled for control.

  “How should I know?” I lied again. Of course I knew. How could I not?

  Part of learning how to perpetrate fraud is learning how to recognize it. However, just as it takes true artistic talent to be a world-class forger, the ability to identify another artist’s signature style is more inborn than acquired. And to my grandfather’s delight, I had a real flair for aesthetic profiling.

  “We should get her outta here.”

  I started at the sound of Dupont’s raspy baritone. Under the spell of the fake Caravaggio I had forgotten that after sneaking me into the building, Dupont, the night custodian, had remained in the corridor as a look-out. My heart pounded. The Brock Museum was spooky in the dead of night. It was spooky in the broad of day, too. Belatedly, I wondered why I had agreed to this midnight assignation in the first place.

  Ernst nodded curtly at the stooped, balding janitor, then turned back to me. “Let me secure the Caravaggio in the vault,” he said. “We have to talk.”

  “What is there to talk about?”

  He gave me a pained look.

  “Oh, all right,” I said with a sigh. Normally I wouldn’t indulge an ex-boyfriend like this, but Ernst was staring down the barrel of professional suicide. I glanced at the workroom clock, the one with large black numbers and a ticking second hand that always reminded me of elementary school. 12:30 A.M. “I need coffee,” I said. “Meet me at Grounds for Suspicion, on Fillmore. Twenty minutes?”

  Ernst nodded distractedly, staring at his pricey but worthless Caravaggio.

  Dupont led the way out of the workroom and through the marble-floored galleries of the European art collection, his grim countenance betraying only his customary dissatisfaction with life. The custodian’s crowded key ring clanked loudly as he unlocked a metal maintenance door tucked behind a gleaming white statue of Apollo. This sculpture was also a forgery, and not a very good one at that, but since it had been sculpted in 137 A.D., nobody was complaining. Funny how bad art plus a millennium or two added up to big money.

  I followed Dupont into a labyrinth of relentlessly beige and gray utility corridors. We snaked our way past endless banks of archival drawers and storage lockers, our footsteps ringing on the linoleum, the unnatural silence broken by the occasional hiss of st
eam pipes. Despite the still-tender humiliation of my unceremonious dismissal six years ago, I breathed a sigh of relief that I was no longer trapped here in the Brock’s vast grid of tunnels, just another timid art mouse in a dead-end maze.

  At last we reached the exit to the rear employee parking lot. Dupont tapped in a security code and held the door open for me.

  “Thanks, Dupont,” I said brightly. “Nice chatting with you!”

  He grunted.

  The door slammed shut behind me.

  I fled.

  “Yo! Skinny latte, half the moo!” the pierced and tattooed barrista sang out.

  Grounds for Suspicion Café was no more than a five-minute drive from the Brock and, open until two in the morning, it was a hangout for serious caffeine addicts. I ordered a nonfat latte easy on the milk, splurged on a chocolate chip cookie, and settled into what used to be my favorite spot by the greasy front window. When I worked at the museum, a group of us would come here to sip expensive coffee and debate the artistic merits of Cubism versus Expressionism. I regularly scandalized my colleagues by disdaining anything painted later than Picasso’s Blue Period. I mean, really—even as a teenager, Picasso had demonstrated the talent of a Rembrandt, yet he became famous for a few squiggled lines and splashes of color. That was art?

  Tonight there were five or six people haunting the café, most, by the look of them, angry young artists and angry young students: sleep-deprived, disgruntled, and dressed tip to toe in black.

  I, too, was an artist, frequently sleep-deprived, occasionally disgruntled, and—I glanced down at my jeans, T-shirt, and jacket—yup, dressed in black. But I was not angry. I was my own boss, and my decorative painting business, True/Faux Studios, was finally enjoying the patronage of a steady clientele.