Cairo (22 page)

The following day, Monday, was a blur. At two o'clock I hovered by the radio to hear the news bulletin. The police had a lead in the ongoing case of the Moonee Ponds killer, an old lady had won a fortune in TattsLotto, an update about the Chernobyl disaster a few months earlier. But nothing about the theft. I realised that somehow, unbelievably, we had gotten away with it.

*

Of course, the gallery did discover the
Weeping Woman
had been taken, and all hell broke loose. On Monday evening, the gallery's director, Patrick McCaughey, sporting his customary bow tie, was assailed by a ferocious media demanding answers.

It turned out that Tamsin and George had placed a card where the painting usually hung. The gallery attendants assumed the card was an official notification of the painting's removal for curatorial purposes, which is why the alarm wasn't raised for a whole day.

The card bore the initials ACT, an acronym for the (previously unheard of) Australian Cultural Terrorists. Tamsin had also posted a letter to one of the TV stations, in which the ACT demanded a prize be established to fund new Australian work; the theft was still primarily a political act for Tamsin and George. Max was furious at this development: he reasoned (correctly, as it turned out) that if the police suspected artists were behind it — as opposed to ordinary art thieves — there was a good chance they would knock on the door of every artist's studio in town.

There was, however, nothing we could do about that. Mr Crisp was now aware we had the painting and would be expecting it within a week or so. Work on the forgery got underway.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS AND NIGHTS, IN BETWEEN DISHWASHING
shifts at the restaurant, I became a mixture of guard and errand boy for Edward and Gertrude, a role I was happy to adopt in exchange for permission to observe them as they worked. I should have been more circumspect about being present during the commission of a crime, but Edward and Gertrude's warehouse exerted an irresistible attraction.

In addition, hanging around the warehouse kept me away from Cairo, where I obsessively listened for Sally's voice, for her footfall, the knock upon my door that never sounded.

No one unconnected with the heist was permitted into the warehouse. James never visited and Max only rarely. Edward had a new exhibition scheduled for the following month, so the rush to finish some paintings was a convenient pretext both for his unavailability and for his paint-stained fingers. Perpetually on the brink of chaos, he and Gertrude scrounged for money and drugs during the day and then painted right through the night.

I fetched takeaway souvlaki and pizza from Lygon Street or cigarettes from the newsagent. I took Buster — who had recovered from his injury — for short walks. Once or twice I was despatched to prise Edward away from the computer game Galaga at Johnny's
Green Room, where he could become entranced for hours while taking a break from mixing pigments.

The theft of the
Weeping Woman
featured daily in the news. Gallery director Patrick McCaughey was bailed up by the press at every opportunity, and I must admit to feeling rather sorry for him. There was much hand-wringing over the flimsy security and the fact the guards, when patrolling after hours, didn't even turn on the lights but merely shone their torches through the cavernous rooms. When McCaughey removed the attendants' chairs to smarten them up, they went on strike. People demanded his resignation. A prominent religious leader wrote to the newspaper, saying it was a relief such an abominable painting was gone. All planes and ships leaving the country were searched, and the minister had the art school turned upside down.

Rather than distracting Edward and Gertrude from the task at hand, the mood of the studio — its freezing air barely ameliorated by an old radiator, the constant threat of arrest, the paltry diet of bread and cigarettes — focused their energy, perhaps in the same way these elements had focused Picasso's. Despite the difficult conditions, the studio was often serene.

As Edward and Gertrude bickered over how best to proceed with this or that element of the forgery, I leafed through their monographs and biographies about Pablo Picasso and regaled them with interesting titbits from Picasso's life: how he'd met Dora Maar in a cafe in 1936, as Hitler was preparing for war; how, although he was by then one of the world's most famous living artists, he was yet to rise to the heights that saw him become the wealthiest artist in history. That year, Picasso was on the verge of great things; idiotically, I believed we were as well. He had remarked that painting wasn't an aesthetic operation but a form of magic designed to mediate between the hostile world and ourselves. Here then, in front of me, was a tangible part of that magic.

Usually dithery and vague, Gertrude adopted the upper hand in her role as the actual forger, with Edward as her grumbling assistant sidelined to mixing pigments, fetching tools and cleaning brushes. While working, Edward developed a set of superstitions he believed assured the success of the enterprise — he despised bananas, for instance, and would not allow one into the warehouse under any circumstances; he had to have a candle lit at all times while work was underway; he would only mix ingredients in a clockwise direction. Gertrude, however, was visibly relaxed and even appeared for the period less encumbered by her various life-threatening ailments.

A paint-spattered radio–cassette player in their studio was almost always on, tuned to local community radio station 3RRR or playing mixed tapes of weird music that was either infuriating or relaxing. It was there that I discovered the dubious delights of bands such as Throbbing Gristle, Foetus, Swans, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth and the Birthday Party. In my mind's eye I can still see Edward in his overcoat dabbing at a paint concoction, analysing it from every angle while
I Love Her All the Time
drones on and on in the background.

The flimsy notebook Gertrude and Edward had consulted when we first brought the
Weeping Woman
back to the studio was, in fact, a manual put together by an infamous postwar art forger called Elmyr de Hory, whom Gertrude had befriended when she was a girl.

In the coming days and nights, Gertrude told me more about this de Hory; indeed, what she told me of his life is worthy of its own book and (as I learned later), de Hory was the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving that, in turn, inspired
F for Fake
, a rambling, stream-of-consciousness documentary by Orson Welles.

‘I met Elmyr in 1964,' she told me as she worked on the forgery. ‘I was only a kid. He was hiding out in Sydney when Interpol
became suspicious that certain paintings being passed off in Europe as modernist originals were actually his.

‘Anyway, my father met him somehow when he came to Australia and started inviting him around for barbecues, although my mother never liked him. My dad thought of himself as a cultured businessman, you see. He was disappointed when Elmyr left after only a year.'

With his European accent, cravat and monocle, de Hory must have been exceedingly exotic at that time, a migratory bird blown way off-course. The charismatic foreigner befriended the eight-year-old Gertrude and — perhaps recognising in her a talent and ambition commensurate with his own, perhaps merely offloading evidence that could land him in jail — he gave her the notebook, along with a ratty cardboard suitcase stuffed with tools of his trade.

‘It's an absolute goldmine of techniques,' Gertrude said one night, as I flipped through the notebook's hundred-odd pages covered with dense scrawl and illustrations. ‘Some of it's hard to read but I can understand more than enough to get this done. Recipes for pigments, preparing surfaces, tips for applying paints and ageing canvases. It's incredible information.'

‘How come it's in English?'

She shrugged. ‘A boyfriend of his wrote it up, I think. Knowing Elmyr, he hoped to make some money out of it one day.'

Deciphering a number of passages, I learned that ink can be made to look aged by mixing it with the same quantity of water and leaving it to evaporate to its original strength; that borate can be used to dry oil grounds; that to make so-called ‘fox-marks' (indicative of great age), scrape rust from an old nail onto damp fabric, press it to paper, and seal it in a plastic bag for a week.

‘And the best thing of all,' Gertrude went on, ‘is that because de Hory was painting in the same era as Picasso, many of
the materials he gave me were what Picasso would have used himself.'

In the suitcase was a jumble of horsehair brushes, palette knives encrusted with paint, vials of powdered pigment, jars of spirits, bottles of linseed oil, extra pages of notes, ink-pads, rubber stamps and all manner of art paraphernalia. There were clumps of charcoal, nubs of chalk, tiny pots of mordant or thinner. When it was flung open in front of me, the smell released was earthy and potent and rich. At once I laughed with appreciation of forgery's fabulous allure; it was the wish to pit oneself against the acknowledged artistic genius of the century. All artists enter into ghostly discussion with those who have gone before. No artist has his complete meaning alone, as T.S. Eliot has noted. The challenge to reproduce a Picasso was akin to entering the ring to fight Ali, writing theatre that Shakespeare might watch from the wings, playing for Beethoven.
I am as good as he is
, the aspirant fumes.
Why is he rich and famous while I toil in obscurity?
This was all the more trenchant for Gertrude, who as a woman had struggled for credibility in a world that had so eagerly nurtured the cult of the solitary, anguished male painter: Rothko, Pollock, Caravaggio, van Gogh. Like most forgers, Gertrude's ambitions were not about money; they were about getting even.

‘My very own father discouraged me from being an artist,' Gertrude told me another night. ‘He mixed with bohemians, but just because you like dogs, it doesn't mean you want your daughter to walk on all fours and bark. He thought it was, I don't know, déclassé. I had to elope with Edward, and we were married at the registry office here in Melbourne. My father was embarrassed when I went to art school, then pleased when I had some success. That all ended, of course. I fell out of fashion a few years ago. That bastard Queel talked Anna into dropping me from her gallery with his French postmodern piffle. My work is too
old-fashioned these days. Real painting is pretty much dead now. Edward sometimes does well selling his work, but people have mostly moved on to other things.'

This was at around three a.m., late in the first week we had the painting in our possession. The original
Weeping Woman
was fixed to an easel. Beside it, on its own easel, was the other canvas on which the forgery was being painted. On the workbench were other squares of canvas for daubed experiments in colour and line. In addition, there were books filled with reproductions of Picasso sketchbooks, from which Gertrude hoped to understand the underlying armature, as it were, of the paintings. All were lit by bright lamps.

The forgery was taking shape, but not as fast as we had hoped. Gertrude had promised to complete it within a week, but she had been delayed. Inexplicably, the version on the easel in front of me looked less developed than it had on the previous afternoon. When I mentioned this, Gertrude told me in no uncertain terms not to be ridiculous and to leave matters of such expertise to her.

Although I said no more about it, there were a lot of blank spaces on the canvas and they, along with Edward and Gertrude's lack of urgency, started to irk me. Edward had already spent three hours earlier that night finding heroin (there was some sort of ‘drought' on) and, once they had injected it, he and Gertrude wasted more time arguing over who produced Iggy and the Stooges' first album. Edward fossicked through the hundreds of records stacked in green milk crates but was unable to find the record in question to settle the dispute, partly because he kept getting distracted and putting on other albums. ‘Oh,' he would say, holding up a cardboard sleeve, ‘I haven't heard
Trout Mask Replica
for ages …'

I was too timid to remind them that the sooner they completed their forgery, the quicker we could offload it, after which they could
buy endless supplies of heroin and argue about the personnel of obscure rock albums as much as they wished. I remembered James warning me about them, and I wondered what on earth we would do if the forgery wasn't good enough, or if Anna Donatella's associates didn't come through for some reason. It didn't bear thinking about.

‘Art forgery has an illustrious history of its own,' Gertrude went on. ‘Who was that guy during the war, Edward? Who did the Vermeers?'

Edward gazed up from the square lid of an ice-cream container he was using as a palette. His mouth was unhinged, his pupils like hawks hovering in the pale sky of his irises. ‘Van Meegeren,' he croaked. ‘
Christ at Emmaus
.'

Gertrude wound a wayward strand of red hair behind her ear. ‘That's right. And there's lots more. There's meant to be a few
Mona Lisas
floating around after that was stolen. The art market is full of fakes, you know. I have it on very good authority there's a van Gogh portrait in the gallery right here in Melbourne that's fake. Warhol gets his assistants to run off a few screen prints so he doesn't get his hands dirty. Rodin had a whole army of assistants. Dalí signed
thousands
of blank sheets of paper before anything was even drawn on them. The name on the work is not always the person who made the thing, but it doesn't usually bother people in the least.'

‘What happened to this van Meegeren?' I asked.

Gertrude coughed into her fist and muttered.

‘What?'

‘He was arrested for peddling art to the Nazis, got addicted to morphine, died.'

‘Oh. And what about Elmyr de Hory?'

There was an uncomfortable silence. Edward busied himself with his vials of pigment.