Feint of Art: Page 6

  Now that I had Anton’s address, I could call off the gallery walk in favor of dinner. But gossiping with Albert Mason had provided a lot of information, and a possible commission, for very little effort. I figured it couldn’t hurt to shake down a few more artsy types. Somebody had to know something. In the art world, somebody always did.

  “You want to grab something to eat first, or should we work up an appetite by assaulting some gallery owners?” I asked Mary.

  “Assault and battery, by all means.” Mary smiled, her big blue eyes blinking disingenuously.

  “Let’s hold off on the battery, shall we?” I said, not entirely sure she was kidding. Those boots looked like they could kick some serious butt.

  We walked toward Chinatown, then turned down an alley crammed with small tables and umbrellas. Well-dressed San Franciscans lounged in the late-afternoon sunshine, enjoying colorful salads of tapenade-topped pan-seared tuna with endive, and watercress with blood oranges and cinnamon-infused almonds. My mouth watered as we headed for the next street over, where there was a clutch of small, understated, and very pricey galleries.

  We went into the first one we came to, the Catharine Chaffrey Gallery, and while Mary strode around ostentatiously checking out the paintings and rolling her eyes, I asked the curator about Anton and Harlan. Catherine Chaffrey, a woman in her fifties who looked as if she’d just been goosed by an electrical current, knew Anton only by reputation. Her voice, dripping with acid, conveyed precisely what that reputation was. When it came to Harlan Coombs, Chaffrey repeated much the same gossip as Albert Mason had: Harlan played the stock market, got into debt, and disappeared with artwork that did not belong to him, although she, at least, did not blame Harlan’s misdeeds on a mythical woman. But the local art scene had clearly been stunned by the betrayal, and we shared a moment of sadness that a system so dependent upon professional ethics had broken down.

  The moment ended when Chaffrey started dishing about the murder at the Brock. Apparently the gossip grapevine worked even faster than I thought, because she speculated that Ernst had been having an affair with Stan Dupont’s wife, who was some sort of minor European aristocrat, and that they had eloped with the money derived from selling the original Caravaggio. I speculated that her scenario was about as likely as Jasper Johns learning how to paint. By her reaction, I gathered she was a Jasper Johns fan.

  We were interrupted by Mary, who had begun wondering loudly what kind of moron would buy this kind of crap. Hustling her out the door, I led the way to the next gallery, where folks claimed, improbably, not to have heard of either Anton or Harlan but were dying to talk about Ernst Pettigrew and the Brock. The next few galleries yielded the now-familiar responses: outrage at Harlan, wariness about Anton, and titillation over the murder. No new information was forthcoming, but it was evident that the respectable art-dealing world agreed on two things: Anton was a scoundrel and Harlan was a crook.

  Oh, and Ernst Pettigrew had killed Stan Dupont in a fight over a deposed Bavarian princess’ love child.

  It was now well past six o’clock and my stomach was growling like the MGM lion. Since we were so close to Chinatown, Mary and I popped into a favorite family-run restaurant, made our way through the cacophonous kitchen, clattered up the rickety metal staircase, took a seat at a tiny table cheek by jowl with the other customers, and ordered an inexpensive meal of hot-and-sour soup, steamed eggrolls, and shrimp with pea pods in garlic sauce, only to end up, twenty minutes later, eating wonton soup, chicken lo mein, and beef with broccoli.

  There may have been a language problem. When it came to things like dining in Chinatown, it was good to be flexible.

  Chapter 4

  Who are these “experts” who spew such vitriol? Have they labored to give birth to a work so magnificent as to make grown men weep? Have they placed paint upon canvas in such a way as to make believers of atheists, romantics of those of hardened heart, or visionaries of the hopeless? Let them hold their tongues until, godlike, they have created beauty where once there was none.

  —Georges LeFleur, “Experts & Other Lower Life Forms,” unfinished manuscript, Reflections of a World-Class Art Forger

  The problem with running a business is that it never runs itself. A corporate employee could take a personal day every now and then without everything going to hell in a handbasket. Not so a small-business owner. If I didn’t do the work, it didn’t get done. Worse, I didn’t get paid.

  The rejuvenating powers of Chinese food caused me to flirt with the idea of setting off after Anton again. But as I pulled out my wallet to pay the check, I reconsidered. I owed some faux finish samples to several clients, and I had to teach Mary how to apply gold gilt so that she could practice for a big job that was scheduled for next month. And if that weren’t enough, I had a commissioned portrait awaiting my attention. On the off chance that I wasn’t cut out to be an art detective, I should probably keep my day job.

  As I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet, the piece of paper with Harlan Coombs’ address fell out onto the table. Grant Street, near California. Hmmm. Right smack-dab in the middle of Chinatown, just a few blocks from where we were eating. It was an odd address for an art dealer who socialized with the crème de la crème of San Francisco society.

  I glanced at Mary, who was watching me patiently.

  Mary, who was almost six feet tall, wore scary leather boots, and was game to do anything.

  “Listen . . .” I said. “Would you mind if we checked something out before heading back?”

  I wasn’t sure what I thought we might find at Harlan’s place. The theft of the Old Master drawings left a number of outraged and politically well-connected art dealers holding the bag. It seemed doubtful that Harlan would be hanging around his apartment, doing a little housework and waiting for the police to show up. Unlikelier still that Anton would be relaxing there with him. And nearly impossible to imagine that upon seeing me they would hand over tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen sketches. But the address was so temptingly near . . .

  “Somebody skip out on the bill?” she asked.

  Realizing that I hadn’t told Mary about my arrangement with Anthony Brazil and Albert Mason, I gave her a quick rundown on the Harlan Coombs mini-drama. I decided against discussing the murder, or my reason for being at the Brock last night.

  “Sweet,” she said. I took that as a yes.

  We inched our way out of the jammed dining room and down to street level, where we pushed through the crowded sidewalks on Grant, passing countless bins piled high with cheap imported goods—bamboo backscratchers, plastic pop guns, painted rice paper fans, carved wooden chopsticks—before reaching the address Mason had given me.

  A small doorway was sandwiched between a souvenir shop and a Chinese apothecary. Brass mailboxes lined the entrance, each with a tiny label. I peered closely. There, after CHAN, HENRY, and CHANG, MEI, was COOMBS, HARLAN. Apartment 3C.

  Mary and I looked at each other. Either Harlan had already absconded or he was the world’s worst fugitive.

  “So push the buzzer,” Mary said impatiently.

  “I’m not going to push the buzzer,” I said, reconsidering. “He might be dangerous.”

  “Push the buzzer, Annie. C’mon—how many art dealers do you know who can really kick ass?”

  Albert Mason flashed into my mind. She had a point. “Well . . .”

  “He’s not gonna be here, anyway,” Mary persisted, reaching around me and pushing the buzzer. “Not if he did what you said he did, and not if people are looking for him.”

  “Yes?” a woman’s voice said after several seconds.

  Mary and I gawked at each other.

  “Say something,” Mary hissed.

  “Like what?” I was terrible at improvising, my heart was pounding, and I was beginning to sweat.

  “Package for, um, Harlan Coombs!” Mary shouted into the speaker.

  The door buzzed. Mary smirked and pushed her way inside. Where did she learn to
do things like this? I wondered as I followed her up a dark, grubby staircase that smelled of cabbage and unfamiliar spices. Mary was from a small town in Indiana. People from small towns in Indiana were supposed to be cautious.

  Then again, Mary had hitchhiked to San Francisco the day she turned eighteen.

  We reached the third-floor landing and paused to catch our breath. A long, unremarkable hallway was painted a dingy yellow and illuminated by a single bare bulb in the ceiling. Muffled sounds from televisions and the clanking of pots and pans drifted down the hall.

  My enthusiasm for this undertaking was waning. What if Coombs was the exception to the art-dealer-as-wimp rule? What if he was a former-Navy-SEAL-turned-art-dealer-turned-criminal? What was I going to say? “Heya, Harlan—you don’t know me, but I know you did some bad things that will send you to San Quentin for a stretch, so I’ll tell you what. You give us the drawings you stole and we won’t rat you out. Oh, and by the way, nobody knows we’re here.”

  Sure, that should work.

  I was about to sound the retreat when a door at the end of the corridor slowly swung open and a tall, elegant woman stepped into the hallway.

  “You have a package for Harlan Coombs?” She spoke coolly, her startling catlike eyes no doubt taking in the fact that we had no package.

  “Well, I—”

  The woman said something over her shoulder and stepped back into the apartment. I relaxed a bit. Maybe Harlan really was home and willing to talk with us.

  Mary and I took a cautious step down the hall but stopped in our tracks when a very large man with no visible neck appeared in the doorway. He did not look happy to see us. Nor did he look much like the grainy newspaper photo I had seen of Harlan Coombs. The identification became irrelevant when the man started lumbering toward us, slowly at first, then gaining speed.

  Moving as one, Mary and I sprinted the length of the hallway and back down the stairs, narrowly missing a large Chinese family from the second floor that crowded into the stairwell just in time to slow No Neck’s progress. Flying down the last set of stairs, we threw ourselves across the minuscule foyer and out the front door. I looked around frantically, grabbed Mary’s arm, and yanked her into the crowded souvenir shop next door, where we crouched behind a display of windup cable cars, on sale for ninety-nine cents.

  After several minutes of heavy breathing I ventured a peek around the snow-globe-packed shelves. Plenty of tourists, but no man missing a neck. Still, there was no way to tell if he was lurking outside, waiting for us to emerge. Together we half crouched, half crawled to the rear of the shop, slipped through a beaded curtain decorated with a painting of the Buddha, and entered a storage room, where two women unpacking boxes of embroidered pink silk slippers started yelling at us in Vietnamese.

  “Out?” I asked, breathless.

  The women pointed in the direction of the front door. “Out! Out!” they cried in unison.

  Ignoring them, we went the other way, only to find the rear exit partially blocked by packing boxes. We shoved and dragged the boxes aside, then Mary burst through the door, with me on her heels.

  We turned right, then made a quick left into a small alley full of smelly trash and caged poultry, came out onto Jackson, where we skirted Union Square, then doubled back onto O’Farrell and jogged to the parking garage on Ellis, double-timing it so as to catch an open elevator. We rode to the fourth level and dragged ourselves toward the truck.

  We climbed into the cab, where all was silent but for the sound of heavy breathing. I was drenched in sweat, my nose was running, my hands were shaking, and I had one hell of a stitch in my side. I was trying to decide whether or not to throw up.

  Several long minutes passed.

  “I’m thinking faux finishing might be more your speed, Annie,” Mary said dryly.

  I glared at her, unwilling to spare the oxygen for a snide reply. Besides, she had a point. Maybe it was time to return to Plan A: don’t quit the day job. Teaching faux-finishing courses for do-it-yourselfers was looking better all the time.

  I fired up the engine, paid a small ransom to the parking attendant, and swung by Mason’s gallery to pick up Mary’s bike, which she had left chained to a lamppost in flagrant violation of the posted signs.

  We drove across Market and past the grimy blocks south of Mission, weaving through the ubiquitous traffic snarls caused by confused tourists, double-parked delivery vans, construction sites, and left-turning vehicles. Mary was quiet until we passed under the freeway and headed toward the warehouses of China Basin. Then she started to giggle.

  “It’s not funny,” I grumbled. “No Neck there looked like he meant business.”

  “Maybe he just wanted the package we promised him,” she said, laughing. “You should have seen your face! You looked scared to death!”

  “Yeah, well, here’s a news flash, Wonder Woman: I was scared to death.”

  By the time we pulled into the parking lot at the studio, we were both a little high on adrenaline and relief. My new landlord looked up from his desk and arched an eyebrow as Mary’s boots beat a tattoo on the old wooden boards outside his office. We both waved at him cheerily, then climbed the outside stairs, struggled with the upstairs door, and clomped down the hall to the studio. I paused to straighten the TRUE/FAUX STUDIOS sign.

  “You’re such a Libra,” Mary commented.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, inexplicably offended. Libras are rather nice people, I thought. Not as stubborn as, say, Aries. My grandfather is an Aries.

  “Because you can’t pass that sign without straightening it. But you never nail the damned thing down so it won’t happen again. Very Libran.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I painted it, didn’t I . . . ?” I trailed off, thinking I’d made my point.

  Mary, a meticulous Virgo, smiled.

  I checked the message machine, but there was no call from Georges. I was still hoping my grandfather could tell me something about Anton’s involvement—or lack thereof—in the Brock Museum murder, and perhaps his current whereabouts. Tomorrow I would check out the address for Anton that Albert Mason had given me, but I doubted the old forger had hung around any longer than Harlan Coombs. On the other hand, it was the only lead I had, and Brazil’s reward money would go a long way toward paying my looming rent increase.

  Then again, I did not enjoy running into—and away from—scary men with no necks. It made sense that Harlan would have a lot of people looking for him and the missing drawings. Thin Woman and No Neck didn’t look like art dealers, but what did I know? In any case, they couldn’t possibly have recognized us, so we were safe. I didn’t exactly have a high profile in the City. Comforted by our anonymity, I put some water on for coffee and turned my thoughts to business.

  First on the list was preparing sample boards. Sample boards were just what they sounded like, samples of a proposed faux finish, which I submitted to the client for approval. It was true that in case of error, misunderstanding, or changes of mind, faux finishes could be painted over. But faux-finishing techniques were complicated, painstaking, and very labor-intensive. I once faux-finished an entire living room four times, and by the time I had completed it to the client’s satisfaction, she and I were ready to have it out with paintbrushes and toxic solvents at twenty paces.

  Linda Fairbanks had asked for boards in shades of sage and ochre, which were among this year’s favorite color schemes. Mary began by priming and painting the boards with an undercoat of Navajo white for the ochre sample, and pale gray green for the sage. When these were dry, we mixed dabs of artists’ oil paint into a glaze medium, known as scumble, made of turpentine, linseed oil, and marble dust. I coated the boards liberally with this mixture, then created texture and pattern with rags, plastic wrap, and a badger-hair brush. The result was a “broken” paint surface that allowed the base color to shine through, creating a luminous, old European look.

  I also owed Irene and Walter Foster two samples, one of a distressed harlequin patt
ern in two color combinations and the other of a mahogany wood grain. The Fosters had a home in the Richmond District that, to my mind, was an example of how to go overboard with the faux finishing, something Mary and I privately referred to as a “faux pas.” But the Fosters loved it, and as long as they paid my bill, who was I to complain?

  The work went quickly. Mary completed the boards and got her first lesson in gilding before leaving around ten for a night on the town. I stayed another hour, touching up the sample boards and faxing supply orders, then turned to the paperwork I’d been avoiding. When the words swam on the page, I worried that I had a brain tumor until I remembered that I was operating on about three hours’ sleep. Cancel the call to the neurosurgeon. Looked like it was past time to pack it in. I left the studio windows open a crack to release any lingering toxic fumes, switched off the overhead fans, grabbed my stuff, flicked off the lights, locked the door, and headed downstairs.

  When I got to the outside stair landing, I peeked over the railing. Sure enough, the lights still blazed in Fender Bender’s office. What was wrong with that guy? Didn’t he have a private life? He glanced up from some blueprints as I passed, and I waved, climbed into my truck, and roared off into the night.

  The next morning, I hauled my lazy carcass out of bed, heated water, ground a coneful of Peet’s French roast coffee beans that I had remembered to bring home from the studio last night, and inhaled as the aroma filled the kitchen. I plopped down at my “rustic country breakfast ensemble”—a cheap pine table and two chairs that I’d bought on clearance with the idea, not yet realized, of refinishing it as “French Country”—and stared intently into my mug.

  I could no longer put off an encounter with the police. I hated the idea of trying to explain why I’d been at the Brock, from which I’d been banished years ago, for a secret midnight rendezvous. But a man had been murdered, and as far as I knew, Ernst was still missing. I might well know something that would help the police with their investigation.