A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (3 page)

“ ‘Pretty’ is good.”

“Her name is Alix London. She’s developed quite a reputation—”

“Wait a minute, this is the daughter of that Met crook? Went to jail for twenty years?”

“Yes, Geoffrey London. It was eight years, actually. But none of that reflects on her.”

Papadakis frowned. “Wasn’t she involved in a murder or something herself, not so long ago?”

“Yes, she was
involved
, but her own record is spotless, absolutely clean. That’s what makes her so perfect. That murder got her a lot of publicity, you see, and my thought was that when that Culture Guru swine and the rest of the paparazzi get wind that she’ll be aboard, it will provide a lovely dollop of excitement… cachet.…” He waved his hand expressively, seeking the word he was after.

“
Frisson
,” said Papadakis and Reed laughed. “Okay, good idea, you see if she’s available, but I’m not paying her nothing. She gets airfare and a free cruise, and she gets to meet a lot of important people. If that’s not enough for her, forget it.”

Reed stood up. “I’ll see what I can do, Panos.”

Two minutes after being dropped off at St. Barts’ tiny Gustaf III airstrip, Reed was on his phone to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C.

“May I speak to Ted Ellesworth, please?”

“Special Agent Ellesworth isn’t available at the moment.” The woman spoke with a twangy New England accent. “My name is Jamie Wozniak. I’m the operations specialist for the Art Crime Team. Can I help you?”

“Can you give a message to Mr. Ellesworth?”

“Of course.”

“My name is Edward Reed. I’m a—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Reed. What is the message?”

“Tell him…” He peered around to make sure he wasn’t being spied on. “Tell him Panos went for it,” he whispered, feeling delightfully secret-agentish. “
She’s in
.”

I
n Brooklyn’s slowly gentrifying South Williamsburg neighborhood, on South Sixth Street, literally in the afternoon shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, was an old bagel bakery, the loft of which had been outfitted as a four-room apartment. In the largest and airiest of these mostly featureless rooms stood its current renter, a tall man dressed in what would have been the height of fashion in men’s at-home wear in eighteenth-century Paris, London, or Rome. His normally longish hair had been shaved off, as it would have been on a gentleman of that era, to make the decorous wearing of a wig in public more comfortable and convenient, and on his head was a woman’s bouffant shower cap, the closest thing to an eighteenth-century man’s at-home “negligee cap” that was to be found in Williamsburg. He wore a richly textured morning gown—it would have been called a “banyan” then—of green silk damask with gleaming blue lapels over a ruffled white linen shirt and a fussy beige waistcoat. In his left hand, his thumb clamped securely through the thumbhole, was a traditional kidney-shaped artist’s palette covered with daubs of mixed paint, and in his right, a delicate brush. A closer look would have shown that his morning coat bore its share of paint spots as well.

The shower cap had come from Walmart, the rest of the clothing from a costume store, and the brush and palette were his own, but all in all he’d done a good job making himself look as if he’d stepped out of a self-portrait by some well-to-do court painter of the mid-eighteenth century.

This was not by accident. The man’s costume was based explicitly on the painter Georges Desmarées’s 1769
Self-Portrait in Old Age
. Moreover, the loft was much as Desmarées’s own atelier at the court of Maximilian III in
Munich would have been: roughly made wooden easels and low, three-legged stools that were used as tables for equipment and material; dozens of ceramic jugs containing hundreds of brushes, some made from stiff hog bristles, others, like the one in his hand, from soft, pliable sable; crude shelving on which pigs’ bladders filled with pigments were stored; and paintings framed and unframed, finished and unfinished (or more likely abandoned), tacked to the walls or leaning against them. On the splintery wooden floors was the customary artist’s litter of crumpled paper, discarded brushes, old props, and used-up paint receptacles, but the room itself was large and impressive, with beautiful velvet swags hung at the north-facing windows, and a great stone fireplace surmounted by an ornate oak mantel that had once decorated an even bigger stone fireplace in a Fifth Avenue mansion. The fireplace itself, long defunct, had come with the loft. The mantel had been rented for one month from an architectural salvage firm in Queens.

All these little conceits were helpful to the man who stood in the midst of them, lost in thought before a painting, a second brush clamped between his teeth. Christoph Weisskopf was an art forger, and among those few truly familiar with the profession, he was judged to be a master. He was also thought to be a little crazy, and this was equally true. The eighteenth-century trappings were not mere whimsy; they were necessities to him. In order to achieve his remarkable results, Weisskopf’s method was to make himself believe for the time being that he truly was the artist he was imitating. The crazy part was that he generally succeeded.

His previous commission had been a Warhol, so he’d bought a straw-blond wig, dyed it even paler, and teased and sprayed it into what looked like an exploding haystack. For the month it had taken him to do the painting, he’d dressed in leather jackets, black turtlenecks, jeans, and high-heeled boots. He’d lived on pastries and tomato soup and pretty much convinced himself he was gay. Sometimes his neighbors didn’t recognize him from one month to the next. Sometimes he didn’t recognize himself and would be startled when he caught sight of his reflection in a mirror or
a window. To switch personas from twenty-first-century New York to eighteenth-century Munich had taken more mental effort than usual, but for two days now, he had
been
Georges Desmarées.

Weisskopf was an exception to the general truth that the art forger’s lot is not a happy one. The less able ones are constantly either in trouble with the law or one step ahead of it; their earnings are small, sporadic, and undependable; and the nature of the game requires them to associate with devious, unappetizing, and often dangerous types. Those with greater competence usually make better-than-good livings, stay out of trouble, and deal with an all-around better class of crooks. But they tend to be even more miserable, for they, almost to a one, are frustrated artists, angry with the prejudiced, know-nothing critics and dealers who dismiss or scorn the work they do under their own names, but are ever-ready to swoon over their “newly discovered” “Cezannes,” “Chagalls,” or “Picassos.”

Not Weisskopf. Weisskopf was happy in his work. The fact that he had seen some of his own paintings, none of which bore his own signature, on the walls of the world’s great museums didn’t bother him. For one thing, he earned top-dollar at his trade, being one of the very few with the talent and discipline to turn out—and get away with—
exact
copies of existing paintings, rather than the usual less demanding, less risky pastiches “in the style of” one artist or another. And unlike most of his ilk, he wasn’t limited to one particular school or another; it made no difference, he could do them all. Donatello? Botticelli? Rubens? Miró? Kandinsky? Dalí? You name it; if you could pay his price he’d paint you one that’d fool any expert. His fee scale ran from $5,000 to $30,000 per picture, up to $1,000 of which was allocated to outfitting himself and his studio in the manner appropriate to the time, the place, and the painter. Each picture took a month to paint, usually followed by another month or so to properly age and dry it. He could easily work on two or three at a time and sometimes did, switching getups and altering his studio to put him in the appropriate frame of mind. His remarkable gifts meant that he didn’t have to work on spec. His paintings were done on commission with fifty percent up front, no exceptions.
Last year his twenty-two commissions from thirteen clients had earned him $380,000 (tax-free, it need hardly be said), and things were looking even better this year.

The commission he was currently in the process of fulfilling was a 1760 portrait by Desmarées of Princess Maria Anna von Pfalz-Sulzbach of Bavaria. Desmarées was far from the most collectible of Rococo artists, but the person who had commissioned it claimed to be the husband of a woman who believed herself to be one of Maria Anna’s descendants, and this was to be a present to her for their twentieth anniversary. As to whether this or any part of it was true, or whether some less innocent plan was behind it, Weisskopf had not inquired, as he never inquired. Unfamiliar with the monetary value of Desmarées’s work, he had checked the auction prices for the artist’s name before agreeing to take on the job and had found that a Desmarées portrait had recently gone under the hammer for $14,360 at Christie’s in New York. Weisskopf, who enjoyed a healthy sense of irony, had set his price for the fake at $15,000.

The painting itself was done. Now he was about to apply the final touches of his peculiar craft, which in this case required creating the appearance of
craquelure
, the network of cracks that appears on the surface of almost every old oil painting. Most forgers accomplish this by rolling up the finished canvas, tying a rubber band around it, and sticking it in a warm oven for a few hours. Weisskopf, being Weisskopf, preferred the more delicate, elegant technique of applying two layers of varnish, the underlying one slow drying and the upper one fast drying. The upper layer thus contracts and hardens more quickly, forming a rigid skin at the surface. Then, when the lower layer eventually contracts in its turn, the by-now inflexible surface skin splits and fissures. The result, if properly done: an utterly convincing
craquelure
, at least to the naked eye.

He had just dipped his brush in the varnish when his phone (kept in the kitchen during his workdays) chirped. He grunted his annoyance and let it continue to ring away while he carefully made the first gingerly
application of varnish. When the answering machine clicked on, all he heard at first was an unintelligible male rumble, but then it picked up in volume, a blast that couldn’t be tuned out.

“You son of a bitch, Weisskopf, pick up the phone, you son of a bitch! I know you’re there; you think you’re fooling me? Pick up the phone!”

Papadakis, dammit.
He gritted his teeth and continued to slide the varnish-laden brush over the painting.

“I’m waiting!”

That did it. The bastard wasn’t going away. Anyway, the trance was shattered, probably for the rest of the day. With a resigned, lingering look at that first glistening swath, he laid his brush across the rim of the can (the can was one of his few nods to modernity) and went to the room that served as his kitchen, while Panos continued raving.

“You heard me, Weisskopf, I’m not—”

He picked up the phone. “Panos, no offense, but can this possibly wait half an hour? I promise to call you right back.”

“No, it can’t wait, you crook, you bum, you two-bit faker!”

“Look, Panos, I’m right in the middle of a delicate—”

“Don’t give me delicate, you goddamn Nazi! How did your lousy Monet get in my collection?”

Weisskopf’s jaw dropped. “
What
?”

“You heard what I said. How did—”

“Panos, I have no idea what you’re talking about. How about—”

“What I’m talking about? I’m talking about my Monet isn’t my Monet anymore. It’s one of your fakes. You think I don’t know your lousy style when I see it? How did it get in my collection? And where the hell is
my
Monet?”

“Panos… Panos, please—” Weisskopf, holding the phone a few inches from his ear to spare his hearing, was fumbling for words.

“You don’t work for nothing. Somebody paid you to do it. Who?” There was a tiny pause, as if for thought, and then the gravelly voice came
down eight or ten decibels, so that Weisskopf had to put the phone up to his ear again to hear the menacing growl that ensued. “Or do
you
have it? If I find out—”