Circles of Confusion (19 page)

There was an armoire by the bed, old and cavernous, standing on carved legs. He got out of bed and shook my clothes off a chair, then picked it up by the back. He planted his feet like a baseball player, pivoted, then swung the legs at the armoire's mirror, shattering it. I felt little pieces of glass prick my face.

"See," he said, panting, happy somehow, "it doesn't matter. It's what these people deserve." He unfolded his pocket knife and stuck it high up in one of the silk draperies, then brought it down with a sickening tearing sound, the beautiful old cloth parting before the shine of his blade. He slashed and slashed again until the silk hung in strips.

I was crying, in shock that things had changed in only a few minutes. Where was the man I loved? He picked up a ceramic figure from the bedside table and hurled it against the wall, then turned to me with a smile.

"Don't you get it?" he said. "It's all ours now. We can do what we want." That was the frightening thing for me, because I think that was the real reason, not what they had done to our boys. But that he could do what he wanted.

I've never dated at home. I knew what they said about me behind my back. Plain. Too serious. Born to be an old maid. Rudy, I thought, was different. He was serious, too. He was a man, not a boy. But now I wonder if he just liked the challenge. Or because I help keep the records.

Each of Claire's teeth was covered with a little mitten. She ran her tongue over them and was immediately sorry. Her face was pressed into the bed, her cheek slashed with pain. Without opening her eyes, she rolled onto her back and ran her fingertips across her face. She found not a cut, but a deep crease from where she had fallen asleep on top of Aunt Cady's diary.

In the shower, she rubbed her face with both hands as she thought about how she had acted the night before. Wobbling around in high heels, so drunk that she needed Troy's assistance to get into the car, then letting him kiss and paw her in front of the driver. She must have looked pathetic. And what about Evan? Even if she was no longer sure about their relationship, was her heart so fickle? Claire stayed under the spray for a long time, as if the water could strip away her memory of the night before.

With the sour taste scrubbed from her mouth and her hair still damp, Claire was walking through the hotel lobby when someone called her name. It was Dante, the painter she had met at the Met, wearing a heavy fisherman's sweater and faded Levi's. At the sight of his high-cheekboned face, something inside her shifted, catching her heart off-balance.

"Dante! What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you. I tried to call you last night, but you were never in. I figured if I came over early this morning and waited that eventually you'd walk past."

"That guy from Avery's took me out to dinner." Claire couldn't resist adding, "To Cri du Coeur."

Dante raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like you've been sampling the best of our fair city." Claire wondered what it would have been like if he had been the one sitting across from her the night before. But Dante was all business, next saying, "I have to know—is your painting in a safe place?"

She thought of the hiding place she had finally settled on. "Yes."

"Good. We need to talk. Where were you headed?"

"There's a Starbucks up the block. I didn't get much sleep last"-— she changed course, trying to make it sound better—"I stayed up too late, reading."

"Uh-huh. Yeah." He gave a little nod and Claire realized he didn't believe her. "How about letting me buy you some espresso made by people who've been drinking the stuff for fifty years, not the last five?"

"That does sound good."

She followed him outside, where he raised his hand to hail a taxi. "I know an Italian place in the West Village where they make a double cappuccino strong enough to make the dead get up and walk."

"Is that what you are—Italian? With a name like Dante, I should have guessed." A taxi pulled up at the curb, and Dante gave the driver quick instructions before settling down beside Claire.

"Only three-quarters. My grandfather was German, which is where the Bonner came in, But for all practical purposes I was raised one hundred percent Italian."

The taxi jostled through streams of traffic, then turned onto a winding cobblestone street. They passed a parked refrigerated truck, its back door open to show rows of pale pig carcasses swaying from hooks. A man in blue coveralls walked up the ramp that led to the back of the truck and threw a carcass over his shoulder, the slit in its belly gaping open like a long mouth. Claire swallowed hard and resolved to give up bacon. A few blocks later, the taxi pulled to a stop and Dante paid the driver.

"Is this Little Italy?" The narrow winding street was crowded with young people window-shopping a gallery selling huge canvases with a single splash of paint, or bargaining for jewelry, scarves and T-shirts at a makeshift market that had sprung up in a vacant lot.

"That's another area of the city. The real Italians pulled up stakes there long ago. For that matter, there aren't that many left here. It was a lot different thirty years ago. I grew up in an apartment a couple of blocks from here, and there were times you heard more Italian than English when you walked down the street."

"Does your family still live here?"

"No. My father runs the family business now. He and my mom live on Long Island in something a hell of a lot bigger than the apartment I grew up in."

As Dante spoke, he opened the door to a restaurant with a white- tiled floor and the silver gleam of a pressed tin ceiling. With its red- and-white-checked tablecloths, it was a world away from the trendy scene outside. An ancient waiter in a battered black suit seated them at a table near the espresso machine, an imposing chrome apparatus resting on a green-veined marble countertop. Dante waved off menus and ordered cappuccinos and cannoli for both of them.

Claire watched as a white-jacketed barman placed a heavy white cup under a spout and slowly pulled down one of the long levers. A hiss, and the cup was half filled with oily black espresso, The mouthwatering scent of freshly roasted coffee filled the cafe. The barman drew down another cup, then poured milk into a second pitcher, held it up to a another spout, long and thin, and depressed still another lever. He swirled the pitcher under the jet of steam until it grew into a cloud of foam. The frothed milk went into the heavy mugs, and finally a shaker of shaved chocolate was tapped over the finished cappuccinos.

"Now tell me if that doesn't beat Starbucks," Dante said after the waiter brought their order to them.

Claire took an appreciative sip and nodded her head in agreement. It would be easy to spend the day here in this big leather booth, watching the old men in buttoned-up sweaters and non- power suspenders playing dominoes under the ceiling fans. She took a bite of her cannoli, enjoying the fresh custard and crisp pastry, then chased it with another sip of frothy cappuccino. "This is really good. Thanks for bringing me here."

"I wanted someplace quiet where we could talk without a waiter trying to hurry us along. Since you first showed me your painting, I haven't been able to think of anything else." He pulled a stack of photos from an envelope and placed them in the center of the table. Even reproduced, the painted woman's calm gaze drew both their eyes. "We need to answer two questions. Who painted this and how did your aunt happen to get it? And more and more, I think the answer to the first question may well be Vermeer."

Claire found it hard to take a breath. What if her painting really were a Vermeer? Then, like a cascade of cold water, she remembered Troy's equal certainty that her painting was not 300 years old, but 50, and painted by someone named Van Meegeren. And Troy was paid for his opinion, whereas Dante was just a former art history major. "Why do you think it's a Vermeer?" Claire kept her voice carefully neutral.

"First, there's the subject of the painting." Dante explained that a woman with a letter was a common theme in seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings. Vermeer himself had made six known paintings of a woman either reading, writing or receiving a letter. "Unlike other painters of his day, though, he left it up to the viewer to guess the content of the letter and the lady's reaction to it." Dante took a final sip of cappuccino, then signaled to the waiter to bring him a fresh cup.

"The other day, you told me you liked Vermeer because he painted mysteries."

"Exactly. Just like the mystery in this painting. And look at all the details—the same things you noticed when I met you. Because Vermeer never made much money when he was alive, he probably painted in his own home, not a studio. He used the same everyday items over and over again. Take this jacket, for example." Dante tapped on the lemony glow of the photograph. "A jacket just like the one in your painting—ermine-trimmed, yellow satin—appears in six Vermeer paintings. When he died at forty-three, a lady's yellow satin jacket was in the inventory of his possessions."

Dante ticked off the other visual clues in Claire's painting that pointed to Vermeer. Her painting had a Turkish carpet. In nine Vermeers there was a Turkish carpet, often bunched in folds and used as a tablecloth. Her painting showed a leather-backed, brass- studded chair with lion's-head finials—as did eleven other Vermeers. There were pearl earrings in eight other Vermeers, white ceramic wine pitchers in six.

"But even those things weren't what convinced me. They are all typical household goods of the period. When I was looking through the archives I even saw an identical yellow jacket—right down to the ermine trim—in another seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Only this one was by Gerhard Ter Borch." Dante leaned forward in his chair, his dark eyes boring into Claire. "Then I looked at the windows in your painting. Vermeer almost always shows a window on the left-hand side of his paintings, either a set of plain leaded glass or a set with stained glass—probably the two sets of windows in his home. This"—he tapped his finger on one of the photographs—"is identical to one of those two sets."

"But shouldn't all of those things make you suspicious?" Claire asked, her mind on what Troy had told her the night before. "You're telling me that everything in this painting points to Vermeer. Isn't anything that perfect likely to be a forgery?"

Dante shook his head. "That's ridiculous! You can't say that because the painting is so clearly a Vermeer then of course it can't be a Vermeer. I take it that guy from Avery's has told you the story of Han Van Meegeren. Did he actually show you any photos of Van Meegeren's paintings?"

Claire had to shake her head.

"I can see why he didn't. Anyone would be able to see in a glance that these paintings were not Vermeers. Most forgers can fool only a single generation. Fifty years ago, there was nearly mass hysteria in the art world when these new 'Vermeers' were discovered. Now they look ridiculous. All the subjects look the same. They have long faces, hollow cheeks and hooded deep-set eyes. Kind of like a third- rate Marlene Dietrich. And nothing like your lady." They both looked down at the perfect oval face, her parted lips, before Dante continued, "Plus, there's no record of a painting like this in the known Vermeer forgeries. I spent a lot of time looking through the museum's archives yesterday. In the Dissius auction of 1671, a Vermeer came under the gavel that was described as 'A woman with a letter standing at an open window, very nicely painted.' And a few years later, there are records showing that Jacob Crammer Simonz had three Vermeers—the Geographer, the Lacemaker, and something called A Woman with a Letter, now lost. I think that this"—he tapped the stack of photographs—"is that lost painting."

The waiter brought fresh cappuccinos. Speaking Italian, he directed what sounded like a question to Dante. Claire had the uncomfortable feeling he was asking about her. Dante answered him in a rapid slur of consonants and vowels. The waiter laughed and shuffled away.

"You speak Italian?" Claire asked the obvious question.

"Kitchen Italian mostly. My grandmothers both kept to the old ways and I spent a lot of time with them when I was a kid." Claire had a mental picture of an iron pot bubbling on the back of the stove while a black-dressed, white-haired woman strung laundry on a line that stretched over the alley. The picture was so clear that it took her a moment to realize it came direct from one of the Godfather movies—was it Godfather IP.

Claire held the fresh mug to her collarbone, enjoying the feeling of warmth from the heavy ceramic. "I wish I had an ethnic background. I'm a mutt. I always thought it would be great to have holidays where you talked about the old country in another language while wearing a special costume and eating traditional foods. I don't even know who my father was. He got my mom pregnant and was long gone before I was even born. I only recently realized that Aunt Cady was probably the only one in the family who would have known about our family tree."

"So what was your great-aunt like?" Dante turned his mug to catch the foam that clung to the sides.

"I hadn't seen her for probably twenty years." Claire thought back to the family picnic when she was fifteen, and Aunt Cady had advised her to live in the real world. "I think she was lonely. Judging by what she had in her trailer, she spent her time reading. Even though I don't think she had touched this painting for years, I think she kept it because it reminded her of a time when she was young and in love, right after the war."

"Where was she stationed?"