A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (8 page)

La mia
c
ucciolina
. My little puppy. Tiny had been born above his cousin Marco’s barbershop on 187th Street in the middle of the Bronx, but he enjoyed throwing in the occasional Italianisms of his Sicilian parents. Get a few glasses of Chianti or Barbera into him, and he even developed an Italian accent.

“So, take a load off,” he said happily, indicating the two remaining vacant chairs. “How about some coffee?” Without waiting for their answers, he went to the Mr. Coffee and poured them a couple of cups. “It’s fresh, sort of.”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Frisby murmured to the ceiling. A Lipton tag hung on a string from his cup.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tiny asked. “I made it this morning. A minute in the microwave and you don’t know the difference.”

“Oh, I guess we’ll chance it,” Alix said. An electric space heater was going, but she was still chilled and having something warm to drink sounded good. She would have accepted hot water if that had been the offer.

They made small talk for a while and then Frisby, with an air of having restrained himself long enough, aimed a visual nudge at Tiny.

Tiny cleared his throat, clapped his hands once, and complied. “Okay, Alix, ready? Here’s tonight’s question for you. Ta-da… what famous artist forged his own paintings?”

Such questions were standard procedure for these post-Sangiovese get-togethers at the warehouse. For years after Geoff’s self-induced implosion Alix’s skin had crawled at the word “forgery,” but as her rapprochement with him had developed, her attitude had changed. It still made her uneasy at times, but now she found knowledge of the subject to be not only helpful in her work but also fascinating. She had come to her own expertise through years of meticulous and painstaking study of
genuine
works of art. Santullo had been interested in teaching her (and she had been interested in learning) how to discriminate between good paintings and bad paintings, not real paintings and fake paintings. Of the techniques, materials, and history of forgery, she’d been taught nothing, she’d known nothing, and she’d wanted to know nothing. Now, with clients beginning to line up for her help in evaluating their paintings, she was making up for lost time, and Geoff, Tiny, and Frisby, experts if there ever were any, were providing the needed education.

“It beats me,” she said honestly. “I don’t understand how you can fake your own work. And if you did, well, by definition it wouldn’t be a forgery, would it?”

They liked it when they stumped her, which was most of the time, so they sat grinning at each other for a few moments, and finally deferred to Geoff.

“Giorgio de Chirico,” he announced.

“De Chirico? But how… I mean, how…”

As usual when the story was complicated, the explanation was left to Frisby, the best-organized lecturer of the three. And this was a complicated story.

De Chirico, the Italian Surrealist famed for his
Pittura Metafisica
pictures—strange, harshly evocative scenes of empty city squares, railway tracks, receding stone arcades, and blank-faced classical statues—decided somewhere around 1918 that, despite his fame and the healthy sales of his works, his talents were suited to more ambitious endeavors. Declaring himself the heir to Titian, he took to painting in a classical style, but his new paintings of nymphs, and naiads, and satyrs were unpopular; galleries didn’t show them, buyers didn’t buy them—

“Why not?” Alix asked. “Surely, he had the skill—”

“It wasn’t a question of skill,” Frisby said. “It was more… well, they were, how shall I put this? They were somewhat, ah—”

“They were crap,” Tiny explained.

“Basically, they were simply ugly,” emended Geoff with a smile. He generally left these sessions to Frisby and Tiny but commented if he thought a clarification might help. “Have you never seen any, Alix?”

“I don’t think so. I know the
Pittura Metafisica
ones, of course—
Anguish of Departure, Melanconia
, and so on, but not the ones you’re talking about. I don’t remember seeing any de Chirico naiads.”

“That’s because no decent museum would have them, and the art history texts very properly turn up their noses at them,” Frisby said. “At any rate, de Chirico’s unsurprising reactions to his rejection by the establishment were seething resentment—a flood of angry critiques of Modernist degeneracy—and a stubborn sticking to his neo-Classicist guns. He continued painting in his new style for the rest of his life, sixty years. He even started signing his work
‘Pictor Optimus
,’ ‘Best Painter.’ But by then his paintings had become a joke and so had he.”

“Yeah, but he got even,” Tiny said with relish. “Come on, Frisby, get to the good part.”

“Well, he started faking his own early paintings,” Frisby said, mildly piqued at having his narration curtailed.

Alix shook her head. “I still don’t understand. How can a painting be a de Chirico forgery if de Chirico himself painted it?”

Geoff interceded again. “Actually, whether or not they are technically forgeries remains open to question. But they are most certainly
fakes
.”

Alix just shook her head this time.

Frisby took over again. “What he did,” he explained, “was to paint a new picture in his old Surrealist style, say in 1950 or 1955, then date it ‘1914,’ or ‘1915,’ or ‘1916,’ and then announce to the world that it was an old work he’d forgotten all about and just found in a closet or some old workshop cabinet.”

“And they were accepted by the public? By the critics?”

“Certainly, why wouldn’t they be? Until, that is, they began coming too thick and fast. Then people began to catch on to him.”

Tiny laughed. “They had a saying going around that his bed must have been six feet off the ground to hold all this ‘early work’ he kept finding under it.”

Alix laughed too, but she saw another, more serious side to it. “But doesn’t that make it hard to determine what was done when? How can anybody know for sure now that a pre-1918 de Chirico is what it’s supposed to be? Even experts.”

“Well, they can’t,” Geoff allowed.

Frisby agreed. “Absolutely. Be assured, most of the ones you see hanging in museums—other than the Museum of Modern Art in New York—are not what they’re purported to be.”

“Right, and anyone who pays top dollar for what’s supposed to be an early de Chirico is out of his mind,” Tiny chimed in. “The guy screwed things up forever.” He grinned. “But he did make good money at it while it lasted.”

“But don’t you think—” Alix, about to weigh in with something about the negative side of this—institutions being hoodwinked, unknowing
collectors paying for pictures that weren’t really what they believed they were—held her tongue. The cheery, laughing faces of the three men told her that the prospect of stuffy museums and ignorant, greedy collectors being bamboozled was more amusing than anything else.
Well
, she thought with a sigh,
what the hell, these guys are what they are and I should be used to it by now.
Besides, the story really
was
funny. “Never mind,” she finished weakly. “Nothing.”

They must have had some idea of what she’d planned to say, because the aborted comment left a silence in its wake.

“Well,” Frisby said. Tiny offered more coffee all around, was uniformly turned down, got some for himself, and sat down again.

“Did any orders come in while I was out?” Geoff asked.

“Only one sizable one,” Frisby answered. “Log Cabin Inns finally decided on what they want in the way of guest room pictures for the new Iowa City place.”

“Good. What?”

“Six of our mix-and-match Corot Collection; twenty-four in all.”

At the mention of Corot, Tiny hooted. “Hey, Alix, did you ever hear the saying about Corot? ‘Corot painted almost two thousand paintings just in the last ten years of his life. Three thousand of them are in the United States, a thousand of them are in Asia, and the rest of them are still in Europe.’ ”

“And how many of them are yours?” Frisby asked wickedly.

Tiny beamed and put on a New York accent that was even stronger than his ordinary one. “ ’Ey, I didn’t do nuttin’. Dem guys, dey framed me.”

“And Alix,” Frisby said, “you know what the most delightful part of the story is? There were so many fakes out there after he died that they put out a picture catalog that would help people separate the originals from the copies. Excellent idea, correct? Except that most of the catalogs were bought by the forgers themselves, who used them to refine their work and make it harder than ever to identify the fakes.”

Geoff, Tiny, and Frisby himself roared with laughter.
Trust these three to side with the forgers every time.
Alix permitted herself no more than another little sigh.

“Well, everyone,” Geoff said, stretching, “I suppose it’s getting a bit late—”

“It is?” said Tiny, reaching into a hip pocket and pulling out an engraved gold pocket watch, much worn by the years and attached to his belt by an old-fashioned key chain. This was an object he took out of his pocket at every possible opportunity. When he pressed the button that opened the cover, a music-box tinkle of sweet Italian music floated into the air. “Eight fifteen,” he declared, preening, if a lug that size could be said to preen.

Alix loved watching him do it. The watch was a gift she’d given him in appreciation for his help on some questions about that alleged Georgia O’Keeffe painting in Santa Fe. When she’d finally found it on
antique-watch.com
, it hadn’t been working (probably since about 1900), but her father had put her in touch with one of his many expert if somewhat dubious friends, this one a skilled watchmaker, and he’d managed to bring it back to life for a modest fee. Altogether it had cost her less than $100, but it had taken a lot of effort to find it in the first place, because she’d been hunting for something very specific. The melody it played was “
Vieni sul Mar
,” one of the songs that Tiny had sung to her as a child. He’d known it from his own childhood, he’d told her, because his grandfather had owned just such a watch and Tiny warmly remembered his own joy when
Nonno
Luigi would allow him to “play” it.

He’d come near to tears when she’d presented it to him and he’d heard it for the first time, but now he just preened and grinned, which was preferable to her, if not to Frisby, who rolled his eyes; it was probably the dozenth time that day he’d heard the tune.

“That odious watch,” he muttered. “How sweet my life would be if I were
never
to hear that vile melody again.”

Naturally this prompted Tiny to start singing it, but Geoff only let him get through two lines before having mercy on Frisby. “Really, all, I do think we’d best call it a day. I haven’t eaten yet, and I imagine you haven’t either.”

Ordinarily, this was the most uncomfortable part of their Thursday get-togethers, the point at which he invited her to come up for dinner and she manufactured some excuse. But, whatever the reason, sometime in the last few hours she had come around to thinking that she’d put off seeing him in his home environment long enough. Whatever it was, she might as well get used to it. So this time around, she intended to surprise him—astonish him, more likely—by taking him up on his offer and doing it with good grace.

“I have some reasonably fresh sourdough upstairs,” he continued, right on cue, “and I’m sure I can find a can or two of soup somewhere. Tiny? Frisby? Would you care to join me?”

Before they could answer, he turned to Alix, who readied her smile. “I’d ask you as well, Alix,” he said offhandedly, “but I know from sad experience that you’d only say no.”

What?
Her smile vanished.

He patted her hand. “Thank you so much for another
extremely
pleasant evening, my dear. Tiny, would you be good enough to see Alix to her car, please?”

“Certainly, boss, my pleasure,” Tiny said gallantly.

“Please, let me,” Frisby said, jumping up and taking her arm before Tiny could object. Alix was surprised. This had never happened before. Seeing her out to the car was long established as Tiny’s job. The reason became apparent when they reached the car.

“Alix, please,” he pleaded, clasping one of her hands in both of his, “next time you get Tiny a present,
please
make it one that doesn’t make any noise.”

She was still mulling things over when she got to her apartment twenty minutes later.
Why
had Geoff not extended his usual invitation? How much did it have to do with this hush-hush new “enterprise” of his? Why had he declined to tell her anything about it? What did it mean that he was “forewarning” her? Had the “boys” been invited up—but not her—so they could continue with their clandestine plans?

Oh, please
, she said silently, to whomever or whatever might be listening,
don’t let them be doing something dumb again!