False colors (8 page)

"Thanks for telling me, Miss Raymond," Nancy said. "I wouldn't have known where to start looking. The first canvas you saw wasn't the real one. It's just a copy Pete made."

52

"You'd better send out the search parties," I said. "I got lost a while back. Now what—"

"I'll tell you later, Pete," Nancy said. "You can let her go now."

I relaxed my grip on Kay Raymond, and it was nearly a bad mistake. Just in time I saw her swing at my face. I jerked my head back and a set of bright red fingernails flicked past my cheek. An inch closer and I'd have been doing my shaving on that side with a nail file. As she completed the swing I grabbed her wTist and gave a twitch and a heave and sent her sprawling onto the couch. She huddled there for a moment, glaring up at me.

"Let's not have any more of that," I said. "That's a judo trick they taught me in the army. I don't do it very well and next time you might end up looking for a new wrist."

Nancy said, "Ask her why she stole the painting."

"You bore me," Kay said. "Go away and chatter at somebody else."

"All right," Nancy said. "We'll chatter at the police."

"When they come around," Kay said, "I have a nice story for them. Of course I took the painting. I did it because the pair of you asked me to take it. The idea was to get another big story in the papers about Accardi. But when you came here tonight, Miss Vernon, to talk about how nicely the trick had worked, you found your boy friend putting in a little couch time with me. That made you so furious you decided to frame me with a charge of stealing the painting."

Nancy looked at her with wide startled eyes. "You couldn't possibly say things like that and get away with them."

"Oh, I don't know," Kay said. "It might be fun to try. There's just enough truth in that story to cause you a lot of trouble."

"She's got something there," I said.

"Don't decide too hastily," Kay said in a purring tone. "I wouldn't mind seeing Pete on the witness stand. Mr. Meadows," she said, making her voice gruff, "isn't it a fact that you actually were on the couch, forcing your attentions on Miss Raymond, when—"

"Oh shut up," I snapped.

"Look at the poor boy," Kay said. "You could hang his face up for a stop light."

Nancy said, "All right. There's no use asking a creature like you any questions."

"My, but you scare easily," Kay said. "Maybe you'd better leave that painting here and forget all about it. You don't know what league you're playing in. But I can tell you right now, it's not the Junior League, dearie."

"Let's go, Pete," Nancy said. "After all, we got what we came for."

Kay said, "You'll go away thinking you're very clever. You had Pete come here first and leave the door ajar so you could get in. You had him put on an act to hold my attention, so you could pretend you found the painting. But after you think it over, Miss Vernon, you'll realize that one part of your plan wasn't very clever. It got a result you didn't expect."

"Oh yes?" Nancy said. "Just what was that?"

"The part on the couch," Kay murmured. "Pete forgot he was supposed to be acting. You'll regret letting him off the leash."

"Come on, Pete," Nancy said. "I wouldn't want to lose my temper."

"Go ahead, Pete," Kay said in a mincing voice. "She wouldn't want to lose her boy friend, either."

I trailed after Nancy to the door. Something ought to be said in my defense, but I didn't know what. We walked silently down the corridor and waited for the elevator and rode down and went outside without having exchanged a word.

"I would like you to know," Nancy said at last, "that I do not consider you my boy friend."

"Naturally," I said.

"You are merely a casual acquaintance."

"Of course."

"After Nick Accardi's troubles are settled, you will go your way and I will go mine."

"Exactly."

"How dare you say that! Wouldn't you even have the decency to come around and see if I was sick or anything?"

"If you'll start this conversation over again," I said, "maybe I can make sense out of it."

"Please don't try."

"Okay," I said wearily. "You go your way and I'll go your way. What direction are we headed right now?"

"We're going back to your shop. Perhaps by the time we get there you can think up an explanation for that romp on the couch."

I said angrily that I didn't have to think one up, and told her exactly how I had cross-examined Kay Raymond and broken down her defenses and—

"Are we," Nancy said, "talking about the same kind of defenses?"

I said coldly, "I am talking about her defense against the charge of stealing the painting."

"Don't put too much Dragnet music into it, Pete. Remember, you don't know how long I was standing there watching."

"You wanted me to get the painting from her. What was wrong with using a little sex appeal?"

"Nothing. Except that she was the one using it."

"Let's change the subject," I muttered. "Let's talk about how smart you were instead of how dumb I was. How did you happen to get there?"

"Well, I sat in your office after you left, and happened to see that copy you had made of Nick's painting. And I was beginning to worry about you. Sending you to that creature's apartment was like throwing a minnow to a shark."

"A shark!" I said disgustedly.

"All right. Like throwing a minnow into a minnow net. I decided you wouldn't get anywhere. I thought if I went to her apartment with the painting rolled up under my coat, and rang the bell and came in and joined you, maybe I would have a chance to ask to powder my nose or something and come back pretending I had found the painting. I didn't have any idea it would work so perfectly. The door was caught on the carpet and

hadn't shut all the way, and I could hear your voices. I was debating whether it was honorable to sneak in, and then the voices stopped and I decided that it wasn't my honor that was at stake. So I came in. I wish I had arrived sooner. But it took me ages to find a razor blade and cut your painting off the stretcher the way she had cut Nick's."

We reached the shop just then, and I unlocked the door and we went into the office. Nancy handed me the two rolled-up canvases. I started putting them away.

"Wait a minute," Nancy said. "What are you doing?"

"Hiding them in a safe place."

"But Pete, I want you to sit down and study them, and tell me why people will fight and lie and steal to get the one Nick painted."

"It's after twelve o'clock," I complained. "I'm tired and I don't have any better answer to that question than I ever did. So—" I stopped suddenly. I was holding Accardi's painting with my right hand and the copy with my left. They were the same size and had been painted in about the same way, but they didn't feel the same. "Pull down the shades on the outside door," I said. "And there's a curtain that closes off the show window. Make sure nobody can see in."

"You found something!" she gasped. "What is it?"

"I don't know. It may be just a wild idea."

By the time she came back, I had both paintings spread out on my desk with the edges weighted so they couldn't curl up. I took a magnifying glass and studied the edges, where the razor blade had sliced through pigment and canvas. Finally I handed the glass to Nancy. "See what I see?" I said.

She took a long look. "He used more paint than you did. His painting is twice as thick as yours. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes. But I knew he had slapped paint on heavily and so I tried to use just as much."

"Maybe Nick changed his ideas as he went along, and painted over what he had done at first."

"I don't think so. This thing was done fast and boldly. He knew what he wanted to do right from the start."

"Then that doesn't seem to get us anywhere."

"It gets us to this," I said. "There may be an entirely different painting underneath."

"Would that mean anything?"

"I haven't the faintest idea. It's not unusual for an artist to take one of his old paintings and do a new one on top. Especially if he's just experimenting and wants to save a few bucks. Of course in time the colors of the first picture will strike through the second one, and give it a muddy look. But that doesn't matter if the guy's just playing around."

"Pete, how can we find out what the first painting looks like? Aren't there ways the experts use?"

"Sure," I said. "We can get an X-ray shadowgraph, or make a picture by ultra-violet light. An expert would have to do it and the result might not tell us much. There isn't any way to have X-rays or ultra-violet light go through one layer of paint and not through others. Even at the best, we wouldn't get a clear look at what's underneath."

"Can't you lift off the top layers some way?"

"That's a job for a restorer. It could take weeks. You get a surgeon's knife and take away one tiny flake of paint after another. It's a terrific problem trying not to hurt the layers you want to save. While you're working you can't even be sure which layers ought to be saved. I have a knife that could be used but—"

"Go ahead and try it."

"I told you it could take weeks!"

"We don't have weeks. Let's do it right now."

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "After a painting has been around for a while, the layers of paint fuse together. It's hard to tell where one begins and another ends."

"But Pete, this hasn't been around long. Anyway the top painting hasn't. Nick's landlady talked as if it was done only a couple of days ago. So maybe it will come off easily."

"I may wreck the bottom painting."

"It's mine," she said. "I'm willing to take the chance."

There was a queer feeling in my stomach. "I admit the top painting is yours, but what if the bottom one isn't?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Let's not talk about it. I might end up too scared to touch the thing. I'll tell you what. I'll make a test first."

I went into the gallery and got the stretcher that had held Accardi's painting. A strip of canvas had been left on the stretcher when the painting was cut off. I dug up a sharp knife and a spirit lamp. I warmed the blade over the lamp flame and went to work on the cut edge of the canvas on the stretcher. Under the magnifying glass there seemed to be a fairly clear division between two layers of pigment. I pried at it, warmed the blade, pried again. The top layer moved. I slipped the blade under it and lifted. The top layer came up slightly, almost like the skin of a tangerine, leaving a few clinging threads binding it to the layer below.

"It works!" Nancy cried.

"So far. I may have hit a freakish place, though. Do you want me to go ahead on the painting itself?"

"Of course I do. Hurry!"

"Hurry!" I grumbled. "At best we'll be here all night."

I started at a corner of the painting. At the first try I made a mistake and found I was getting into the upper layer. I took another try. This time it worked. There were two paintings, and when I hit the right spot I got that tangerine skin result. It was slow work, though, and took so much concentration that it made me jumpy and breathless. Nancy kept leaning over trying to watch, and once her hair brushed my face and I growled at her. In fifteen minutes I raised a triangular flap about an inch long. I got some wax paper to slide between the layers as I worked, so they wouldn't stick together again.

After getting that far the job went faster. The painting underneath had been varnished and dried thoroughly. That made a poor surface for over-painting. The top painting had been done recently with heavy blobs of pigment. Oil paints don't dry quickly, unless you use a drying agent in them, and so the top layer was still a bit soft. It was a real break. You'd never have

luck like that in ordinary restoration work. As I made progress I kept sliding the wax paper forward, and refused to let Nancy peek underneath. I was afraid of losing my touch if I stopped. In about an hour I had most of the top layer peeled back.

"All right," I said. "Let's take a look." I lifted the top layer and pulled out the wax paper.

"Wow!" Nancy said.

We were looking at a landscape. In the foreground, wheat was ripening under hot sunlight. There was a farmhouse with a sun-streaked roof. In the middle distance a lone cypress writhed up into the golden air. Purple hills rolled across the background. The wheat field sloped from left to right, flooding across the canvas in a green-gold torrent. There was a gray-blue sky with scorched puffs of clouds. The painting had been done with quick forceful brush strokes and lots of pigment. It boiled with life. It could have given 3D a lesson in how to jump out at people.

"Nick never dreamed that up," Nancy said in awe.

"You're so right."

"I wish there were a signature so we could tell who did it."

"The signature is all over it," I said. "It's in every brush stroke and every touch of color. The guy who dreamed this up was Vincent Van Gogh."

For a minute Nancy didn't say anything. In the silence I could almost feel the presence of the big violent Dutchman: the painter who took the raw colors of Impressionism and twisted them into a rainbow . . . the guy who shook up art so that it could never be the same again. The painting in front of us was from the year when he was painting at Aries in southern France. I had never seen it before but I couldn't miss on the thing. Nobody before or since ever painted sunlight like that. Just looking at it was almost enough to give you a tan.

Nancy said faintly, "It can't be a real Van Gogh, can it?"

I rummaged in a drawer until I found a needle. "I don't think so," I muttered. "But if I'm wrong I ought to be shot." I poked the needle carefully into the painting, near one corner. Then I pulled it out and used the magnifying glass to study the tiny hole. I breathed a little more easily. "It's a copy," I said.

"The original would have been done in 1888 or 1889. The paint should be quite hard, and a needle ought to make tiny cracks in it. But this needle didn't make any cracks. So the paint can't have been drying more than thirty or forty years. As a matter of fact, I'd guess it was done quite recently."