Feint of Art: Read online

  I caught myself at midsentence. I didn’t know how much Inspector Crawford had figured out, but it seemed foolish to risk leading her to Anton.

  While I was thinking this through, there was silence on the other end of the line. Then the inspector said, “Perhaps you could take your nap after the meeting, Ms. Kincaid.”

  Reluctantly, I agreed to be at the Brock at eleven thirty—I couldn’t think of a way out of it—and hung up. It would take about two hours to drive to Yountville, so even if I left around one o’clock I should have plenty of time to get there before the antiques shop closed.

  I considered going to the studio and getting some work done beforehand. After all, it had been all of five minutes since I’d been worrying about my finances. The problem was, by the time I showered, dressed, and drove into the City, I would have only about an hour until I had to leave again, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to get into anything good and messy, like sample boards.

  Finally I decided to take a walk to clear my head and shake the nervousness that had been plaguing me lately. If Stan Dupont had been killed because he stumbled across the truth about The Magi, and Ernst Pettigrew had disappeared because he knew the painting was a fake, then, as Inspector Crawford suggested yesterday, it stood to reason that anyone else who knew about the forgery was also in danger. Not that I was overly concerned about myself, since no one except Ernst and the SFPD could connect me to The Magi.

  My apartment was only a few blocks from Lake Merritt, a tidal lake connected to the bay that was about three miles in circumference and encircled by a meandering pathway. There were several fountains, a couple of boat-houses, a playground, and scores of squabbling ducks and geese. After half a mile I felt a surge of energy, and the leisurely stroll morphed into a power walk. It felt good to put the excess of adrenaline somewhere, and I vowed to exercise regularly. By the time I returned to my apartment and dragged myself up three flights of stairs I had, predictably enough, reconsidered.

  I showered, blew my hair dry, and applied a touch of mascara, eyeliner, and lipstick before heading into the bedroom to dress for the meeting at the Brock. I was unsure what sort of image I wanted to present to this group of art mavens who had so thoroughly trashed my world. I wondered, in particular, whether Dr. Sebastian Pitts would be there.

  Years ago, when Pitts had been a curator for Britain’s elite Remington Museum, he had unwittingly trumpeted the authenticity of a number of my teenage forgeries. Art authentication is an inexact science, and all art authenticators make mistakes, but few made as many, and for such appalling reasons, as the oleaginous Pitts. When my grandfather decided to write an exposé of art authenticators for the London Times—anonymously, of course—Sebastian Pitts was a target too delicious to ignore, and the ensuing scandal forced Pitts to resign from the Remington.

  Unfortunately, he eventually resurfaced in San Francisco, where his academic credentials and snotty British accent made him a darling of the art scene in a city where only a gratifying few had so much as a nodding acquaintance with the London Times. I had been working for the Brock for nearly a year, blissfully applying my talents to legitimate restoration work, when Pitts recognized me. One minute I was touching up a tiny Giotto religious panel with egg tempera and twenty-four-karat gold leaf, and the next I was banished from the Brock’s hallowed marble halls. Within a week, no reputable museum or gallery in the City would return my calls.

  Perhaps today was a chance for me to redeem myself, if only a little. So: how best to dress for what was likely to be a remarkably awkward meeting? Creative and artsy? No, the line between artsy and tacky was a thin one, and I didn’t trust myself not to cross it. Buttoned-down and businesslike? To the Brocks, success was spelled d-u-l-l. Yes, that would work.

  I almost never wore pantyhose and heels, which I was convinced some demon had invented with the sole intent of impoverishing and disabling intelligent women. But sometimes one had to stoop to conquer, I reminded myself as I struggled into the pair of sheer black hose that I saved for just such occasions. From the limited offerings in my closet, I selected the conservative black wool A-line skirt and matching waist-length jacket that my mother had given me for my birthday last year. Since it looked vaguely funereal, I decided to wear a red silk shell under it. Red for power! Then I thought that might be pathetically obvious, so I exchanged it for a coral-colored shell that, I told myself hopefully, set off the auburn highlights in my hair.

  I slipped on my black leather pumps, the ones with the rubber soles and sensible two-inch block heels that I had bought because an advertisement on TV claimed they were comfortable enough to play basketball in. Which had turned out to be a big fat lie. But as heels went they weren’t too bad, and they were reassuringly proper.

  My sole concession to artiness was my jewelry. Around my neck I wore an exquisite hammered-silver chain with lines of garnet beads hanging down in strands beside a small antique key, which my friend Samantha had made me for my thirtieth birthday. She said it symbolized good fortune, and today I needed all the support—real and symbolic—that I could get.

  I stood back and looked at myself in the nearly full-length mirror leaning against the wall in a corner of my bedroom. I looked businesslike. Respectable. Boring.

  Perfect.

  I was nearly out the door when I remembered the afternoon’s itinerary. No way was I going to spend the afternoon in Napa in a wool suit, hose, and heels. Ducking into the bedroom, I grabbed the blue canvas tote I had received during a pledge drive at KQED, and shoved in a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, running shoes, socks, and a dark blue sweater. Now I was ready.

  I felt pretty good about everything until I got to my truck and remembered I had yet to repair the broken window. By the time I crossed the Bay Bridge I would be my usual disheveled self. So much for respectability. My mood was not improved when I remembered that there were no casual carpools on Saturdays so I’d have to wait in line at the bridge and fork over the toll. I wondered if I could get the city to reimburse me, since I was on official business. What was Inspector Crawford up to, anyway, and why were we meeting with the board?

  I supposed the inspector wanted to go over my meeting with Ernst again, and thought that being at the museum might jog my memory. Or maybe she wanted me to take another look at The Magi with museum officials in attendance. I wondered if the board knew I was coming, and whether they now realized that I had been there that night. Perhaps I wasn’t as anonymous as I thought. On top of everything else, I could only assume that Sebastian Pitts and Agnes Brock had wasted no time in informing the police of my checkered past.

  Arriving at the museum, I began the perennial search for parking. Round and round I went, the added frustration doing nothing to calm me down. As I finally walked up the broad granite steps to the entrance, ten minutes late, I spied my SFPD escort waiting for me. Ichabod nodded and the African Princess thanked me for coming.

  The Brock was, as always, quiet. Too quiet. And not because of the acoustics, either. The marble floor, walls, and vaulted ceilings should have magnified sound, not minimized it. I could only surmise that the Brock family’s money had managed to corrupt even the laws of physics. We passed through a set of heavily carved mahogany double doors into the administration wing and, halfway down the hallway, turned into the Founders’ Conference Room.

  Awaiting us was what promised to be the Meeting from Hell. Grouped along one side of the absurdly large and highly polished burled wood conference table was everybody who had ever taken a dislike to me during my brief tenure at the museum, and then some. The first unfriendly face I saw belonged to Sebastian Pitts, who curled his lip. Then came the Brocks: Agnes, the matriarch, who had signed the letter welcoming me into the Brock Arts Internship Program seven years ago and personally ripped it up a year later; next to her was her only son and his wife, the boring Richard and the elegant Phoebe, both of whom I had met for all of twenty seconds at a Brock Employee Holiday Bash. There were also assorted lesser Brocks, each of whom had in
herited the family’s distinctive jutting brow ridge and protruding nose. The only non-Brock on the board was the sixty-year-old heiress Camilla Culpepper, a good friend of Mrs. Brock’s. I knew Mrs. Culpepper only by her picture in the administrative lobby, but I remembered hearing that Camilla was so myopic she had once mistaken a Manet for a Monet. Thick, diamond-studded glasses hung unused from a filigree chain around her skeletal neck as she squinted at the attractive young man next to her. At least she was too distracted to glower at me as the rest were doing with what appeared to be varying degrees of ill will.

  Never one to put off a confrontation she could enjoy immediately, Agnes Hilary Cuthbert Brock raised her plucked eyebrows, stared down her hawkish nose, and spoke. “My Caravaggio is most certainly not a forgery, young woman.”

  “Um . . .”

  “The suggestion is supremely preposterous.” Mrs. Brock’s exquisite hauteur was marred just a smidgen by the fact that she spat a little getting out the p’s. Pitts surreptitiously wiped his glasses with a monogrammed handkerchief.

  “The temerity! To challenge the word of Dr. Sebastian Pitts, the world’s foremost expert on Caravaggio!”

  I rolled my eyes. Pitts was no greater an authority on Caravaggio than he was on Cézanne, or, for that matter, on global warming. He was, however, a world-class sycophant.

  “Um . . .” I tried again.

  “I do not care to hear another word from you, young lady,” Mrs. Brock informed me. “The Magi is exquisite, the jewel in the crown of the Brock collection. Unless you cease your outrageous slander this instant, I shall sue you for defamation.”

  Spit or no spit, Agnes was on a roll.

  “Well? What have you to say for yourself?” she demanded, apparently forgetting that she had just ordered me to remain mute.

  “Grandmother, for heaven’s sake, let the poor woman speak.”

  I turned toward the unexpected source of support and saw a man sitting on my right who I assumed was Edward Brock, Richard and Phoebe’s youngest son. He was about my age, give or take a few years, very tucked-in and preppy, with the look of an up-and-coming attorney or stockbroker.

  “Yes, dahling,” Camilla Culpepper said to Agnes. “Your handsome grandson is right. Let the woman speak.”

  All eyes slewed back to me.

  “Well?” the dragon lady demanded shrilly.

  I said nothing, trying to keep my temper in check. It wasn’t my fault that her stupid painting was a fake, and I had had enough of her abuse. I didn’t work for the family anymore, and I didn’t have to take this crap.

  “Speak! Speak!”

  That did it.

  “Woof!” I barked.

  A collective gasp issued from the Brocks, though I could have sworn I heard a snort of laughter. It didn’t come from Agnes Brock, that was for sure. The old woman made a choking sound, her face turned bright red, and for a horrible moment I thought she might collapse.

  Taking advantage of the shocked silence, I spoke again, more reasonably this time.

  “I realize this is an awkward situation,” I told them. “Please bear in mind that the world’s finest museums and galleries have bought and displayed fakes, and that those paintings had also been authenticated by experts—”

  I thought my little speech was rather gracious under the circumstances, but apparently I was alone in this opinion, for at this point all hell broke loose. Sebastian Pitts and Agnes Brock leapt to their feet and started spewing invective, Edward Brock countered with a few tentative words in my defense, Camilla Culpepper seconded them, Richard and Phoebe Brock turned hotly on Edward and Camilla, the Brock cousins chimed in, and soon an all-out family shouting match was under way.

  Inspector Crawford cleared her throat and a hush fell over the room. How does she do that? I wondered. When Pitts and old lady Brock took their seats, the inspector nodded at me.

  “As I was saying,” I continued, “I’m not trying to stir up trouble. But Ernst Pettigrew had his doubts about The Magi, despite the authentication.” Note to self: avoid Sebastian Pitts’ eyes, which were doing their best to turn me into a pillar of salt. “That’s why he called me in. Whatever you may think of my personal history—indeed, for that very reason—if you are honest you will admit that I know forgeries when I see them. And there are several problems with the Caravaggio.”

  The conference room was now so quiet that I could hear the ticking of the ancient grandfather clock that Mrs. Brock’s family had shipped all the way from Boston to California in 1852.

  “First, the brushstrokes are off,” I explained. “Not all of them, but in the background—”

  “It was common in the sixteenth century for lesser artists, or for artists-in-training, to fill in the backgrounds for the master artists,” Sebastian Pitts interrupted. “Background work required minimal skill, and delegating it to assistants saved the masters a great deal of time, allowing them to create other masterpieces.”

  “True enough, but as I am sure you will recall, Dr. Pitts, Caravaggio was vilified by his peers because of his scalawag lifestyle, and cast out of society altogether when he was accused of killing a man over a tennis match,” I responded. “He was a solo act. As I was saying, Caravaggio didn’t use his brush that way, nor did he work in a studio with those who did.

  “Second, until the eighteenth century blue oil paint was made from semiprecious stones, like lapis lazuli and azurite. It was extremely expensive, and used primarily by artists with rich patrons. Caravaggio could rarely afford it, yet in this painting the Christ child’s blanket is lapis blue. The unusual use of color is another red flag that The Magi might be a fake.

  “And finally, the lighting on Balthazar’s face is off ever so slightly, and as you all know, Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, or dramatic use of light and shadow, was his trademark. The lighting here isn’t wildly wrong, but it’s not as strong as I would expect to see in a Caravaggio.”

  I stopped there. These problems alone were sufficient to cast grave doubts upon the painting’s authenticity. But there were other, far more damning ones that I decided not to share with the Brocks and the inspectors. Thanks to my grandfather’s tutelage, I had recognized that the apparent flaw in the lighting was not a mistake. It was an inside joke—a sure tip-off that the painting was a fraud.

  One of the biggest problems an art forger faces is his or her own ego. It takes years of training and remarkable talent for an artist to create a copy worthy of being acclaimed as a true masterpiece, and in the end the forger does not have the satisfaction of claiming credit for the work. However, I knew that few forgers could resist secretly “signing” their best pieces. One of the keys to unmasking fakes by known forgers, therefore, was to know what signature to look for.

  The trick with the lighting and the addition of a touch of lapis blue were Anton’s signature. Grandfather’s was the tiniest little hatch marks in the mottled background color. My signature, when I was forging Old Master drawings, had been the slight smile I gave to one of the subjects in the scene. Before the twentieth century, drawings or paintings rarely portrayed their subject smiling, and thus those that did were much more valuable. Unfortunately, my signature proved to be my downfall when I raised suspicions by flooding the market with too many smiles.

  I said none of this to the group assembled. I wasn’t about to rat out Anton. Or Grandfather. Or myself.

  Predictably, Pitts was unconvinced and launched into a long and inventive tirade during which he condemned me, my grandfather, and pretty much all those of artistic temperament. When he finally wound down, he demanded we view The Magi so he could put the issue to rest, once and for all. Striding dramatically across the conference room to the covered painting on an easel in the corner just behind me, Pitts yanked off the cloth with a flourish and revealed The Magi.

  The brush marks were consistent with Caravaggio’s style, the Christ child’s blanket was a classic Venetian red, the lighting on Balthazar’s face was perfect.

  I started to sweat. My face grew f
lushed, and the muscles at the base of my skull began to cramp. My wool suit was itchy and stifling. It was hard to breathe.

  I walked over to the painting and peered at the background. There they were, plain as day: tiny, exquisite hatch marks. Georges François LeFleur, art forger extraordinaire, had struck again.

  I looked up dully. Pitts’ round face was split with a smile, relishing the prospect of my imminent humiliation. I caught Inspector Crawford’s eye.

  “May I speak with you for a moment, Ms. Kincaid?” she asked. I could have kissed her.

  “Certainly, Inspector,” I said, already halfway out the door. Ichabod followed us into the mahogany-lined hallway, shutting the door behind us.

  “What just happened in there?” Crawford asked. “What did you see?”

  “It’s a fake.”

  “Yes, you’ve already said that.”

  “No, it’s a different fake.”

  “What?” For the first time since we’d met, Inspector Crawford’s face registered surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite.”

  “Why would anyone paint two fakes?” Ichabod piped up.

  “They’re two different fakes. Painted by two different forgers.”

  The inspectors stared at me. I shrugged. Well, I didn’t do it.

  “Do you recognize the artists?” Inspector Crawford asked.

  “Why ask me?” I demanded disingenuously. “It’s not as though I’m in the forgery business.”

  In politics, this was called the non-denial denial.

  “Sebastian Pitts and Agnes Brock have suggested otherwise,” Ichabod replied.

  I shrugged again, in a “What can you expect from such people?” kind of way.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” said the suddenly perceptive Ichabod, leaving me to recall his former silences with fondness.

  “All I know is that the painting in that room is not the same painting Ernst Pettigrew showed me the other night, nor is it a genuine Caravaggio.”