Feint of Art: (6 page)

“Well, I . . .”

“Please, Annie. For old times’ sake. For your father’s old friend.”

Nice try. Like I was sucker enough to think that helping Anthony Brazil would somehow earn me my father’s esteem.

“I would, of course, make it worth your while,” he added.

Now
he had my interest. I hated to focus so much on money, but I was staring down the barrel of a major rent increase.

“How much are we talking about?”

“I could offer, oh, say ten percent of their market value.”

“Twenty.” I figured I had him on the ropes, and I knew he could afford it.

“Ten, and that’s my final offer.”

“Twenty, Anthony. It’s a bargain at twice the price and you know it.”

Brazil blanched. I was starting to think it was his version of a facial tic.

“Fine,” he snapped, and stood up. “Twenty percent. I need those drawings and I need them soon. You have only one week and then the deal is off. Agreed?”

I nodded.

“Oh, and Annie,” he added as he moved toward the door, “this must be done with the utmost discretion. The
utmost.
My reputation is on the line. I trust I can count on you?”

“Sure thing,” I said, opening the door for him. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’m the soul of discretion.”

Brazil grimaced one last time and was gone.

I leaned against the door, thinking. Years ago I had vowed never again to involve myself in the underworld of art fakes and forgers. Unfortunately, I now had to make some money and I had to make it quickly. I didn’t see any way around it: just this once I would have to break my vow.

One week to catch a forger. Luckily, I knew who he was, and had already planned to ask him a few questions about a certain fifteen-million-dollar fake.

It looked like Anton had been a busy boy lately.

—Georges LeFleur, “How to Market Your Forgery,” unfinished manuscript,
Reflections of a World-Class Art Forger

 

I retrieved my assistant, a latte, and a gruyère cheese croissant from the bakery, asked Mary to continue working on a large fir dining table we were faux-finishing to resemble intricate inlaid stone, and set out to find Anton Woznikowicz.

As I headed across town I sipped my latte and reminisced about how patiently the paunchy, good-natured Pole had taught me to achieve the coveted Old Master crackle, back when I was a budding teenage forger and he was still working with my grandfather. I could not believe he would have willingly been involved in Dupont’s demise. Anton had a hot temper, but he was not the violent type. He was more the sneaky, behind-the-scenes type.

Still, I was willing to bet Anton could shed some light on what had happened at the Brock. After all, the list of people with the money, knowledge, and connections to commission a high-quality forgery and arrange to swap it for a museum’s original masterpiece was a short one. It was also possible that the Caravaggio forgery had no connection whatsoever with last night’s events at the museum, in which case I could concentrate on shaking down Anton for Anthony Brazil’s stolen drawings—thus securing my immediate financial future—without feeling compelled to mention the wily art forger when I spoke with the police.

Invigorated, I circled the hilly, clogged streets of San Francisco’s Noë Valley and Bernal Heights neighborhoods, sure that I would recognize Anton’s studio when I saw it. True, it had been several years since I’d last visited, but my memory was pretty good. After half an hour of fruitless searching I lost all confidence in my powers of recollection, took a deep breath, and tried to think of other ways—besides my grandfather—to find Anton’s address. I had my cell phone in my pocket and fully charged in case Georges called me back, but I wasn’t betting the family portfolio on it.

Who else might know where to find Anton? I angled the truck into a tiny parking space on Sixteenth in front of Mission Dolores and pulled out my phone. I stared at it, but it stared back mutely. Perhaps Anton had already been questioned by the police and fled the country with the genuine drawings and I was wasting my time. Maybe Ernst had finally turned up, the real Caravaggio had been recovered, and the murderer had been caught. But how would I find this out? The City’s art community would know; its grapevine put the UN to shame. But unfortunately I was no longer part of that community.

I continued to stare at my cell phone, wondering what was happening at the Brock. I decided to try calling Ernst again, figuring I had nothing to lose.

His voice mail picked up at both numbers.

Rats. Frustrated and at a loss for what to do next, I watched a young cassock-clad priest shepherd a group of teenagers into the mission’s historic garden. I wondered what it would be like to be part of a religious order. I kinda liked the wardrobe . . .

Okay, Annie, focus.
Who else did I know at the Brock? There was Naomi Gregorian, although that was iffy. Not because we didn’t know each other well, but because we did.

The year after college, Naomi and I had been art interns at the Brock. We spent hours shoulder to shoulder under a fume hood, cleaning paintbrushes with noxious chemicals; wore itchy polyester uniforms while serving canapés at receptions to which we were not invited; and ran countless personal errands for the upper-echelon staffers. And we did all of this gladly, in exchange for the privilege of learning the ancient techniques of art restoration.

I was disappointed but not surprised when Naomi dumped me the moment I was bounced from the Brock. She had always known which way the wind was blowing. While I sweated to get my faux-finishing studio off the ground, Naomi grimly climbed the museum’s steep ladder from intern to art restorer. From time to time our paths would cross at a gallery opening or at the Legion of Honor, and we would exchange nods and a few polite words. If I called her, Naomi probably wouldn’t hang up on me.

Probably. The Brock’s switchboard operator put me through.

“Naomi Chadwick Gregorian,” a voice singsonged officiously. Chadwick was Naomi’s middle name, which she had never used until she became a full-fledged art restorer and snob.

I found it all a little hard to swallow. Naomi and I had first met as freshmen in college, where we were both art majors. Our strained friendship took a turn for the worse our senior year, when I discovered that Naomi had fished through my studio scraps and included some of them in the portfolio she submitted to win a coveted slot as an intern at the Brock Museum. When I saw my sketches among hers during the celebratory art department reception, I debated raising a stink but ultimately decided against it. One of the many things my grandfather had taught me was to stockpile such information for future leverage.

“Naomi! It’s Annie!” My voice rang with false cheer and bonhomie. “Annie Kincaid!”

Silence.

“Naomi? You there?”

“Hullo, Ann,” Naomi replied stiffly.

My given name was Anna, though I preferred Annie. Either would do. Ann would not.

Naomi knew this.

“This is probably an odd question,” I babbled on, as if Naomi weren’t sending subliminal “drop dead” messages through the telephone line. “Or maybe not, considering what’s going on there. And listen, about that, I don’t really know, but it’s bothering me, which is why I’m calling.”

Hmm. Maybe I should have thought this out better before dialing.

“What do you want, Ann?” Naomi asked curtly. True to form, she was not going to make anything easy for me.

“I heard Stan Dupont was killed last night at the museum,” I replied. I winced at my bluntness. Poor Stan.

“We’ve been asked not to discuss the matter with the public,” she said frostily.

“I’m not ‘the public,’ Naomi. I’m your old friend. Remember, Nancy Fancy Pants?”

That should get her. “Nancy Fancy Pants” was Naomi’s freshman-year dorm nickname. The students on our floor had bestowed it upon her because while everybody else wore patched jeans and faded T-shirts from Goodwill, Naomi wore matching separates from Burberry and Ann Taylor. The woman had an unhealthy relationship with monograms.

To be fair, Naomi was not singled out for this treatment. Everyone in our dorm had a nickname. Mine was “Kinky Pinky Kincaid,” thanks to a brief and largely regrettable flirtation with fuchsia hair dye. But whereas everybody else outgrew their nicknames, Naomi’s had stuck.

“You most certainly are the public, Miss Hoity Nose,” she replied hotly.

It was my theory that Naomi had never forgiven me for being a better artist than she. I wasn’t sure where the “Miss Hoity Nose” came from.

“Just tell me what happened,” I said, remembering another pertinent fact about Naomi: she couldn’t resist gossip.

“Well . . .” she said dramatically, “as long as you promise not to tell anyone . . .”

She was cracking. I checked the clock on my truck’s dashboard. It had taken less than three minutes.

Naomi’s voice fell to a whisper. “It was last night, after closing. The interns were gone by about ten, so it must have been after that. The museum was as silent as a tomb,” she said, piling on the melodrama.

“And . . . ?”

“I’m trying to tell you, if you’d just listen,” she whined.

“So tell me already.”

“You don’t have to be so rude, Ann.”

I took a deep breath and counted to ten.

“It was Stanley Dupont, one of the janitors. He was shot. Murdered most foul.”

“Was it a robbery? Was anything taken?”

“That’s the weird thing,” she replied. “The security tapes should have shown something, but they’re missing. Apparently the alarms were shut down for a while just before midnight, and someone opened a side door. You know Stanley had been with the Brock
forever
—he had access to almost everything. Carlos in Security told Debbie in Accounting that he heard that Stanley had brought in a woman, but nobody knows for sure. It’s hard to imagine him sneaking a woman in for a secret rendezvous. I mean, ick.”

“Mmm?” I replied, distracted by the image of myself as Mystery Woman.

“The really odd part is, Stanley was found near the main vault, where
The Magi
is kept,” Naomi continued, clearly delighted, as people often were, to be the bearer of bad news. “You know, the Brock’s newest acquisition. But the vault was locked. If someone was trying to steal the Caravaggio, why kill Stanley before the vault was opened?”

“Surely Dupont didn’t have access to the vault?”

“No, of course not, but a thief might have thought he was Security. Stanley always had a lot of keys. Or maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“So
The Magi
is still there?”

“Yes. Nothing was taken. And poor Stanley was doing so well. He just bought himself a new cherry red Miata and a time-share in Cancún. I saw pictures. Lots of thatched-roof huts on the beach. All for nothing. I mean, it just seems so senseless.” For once, Naomi and I were in accord. “Maybe it was something personal. Maybe the woman was someone’s wife. Can you imagine cheating on your husband with Stanley?”

Nope, sure couldn’t.

“Does the name Anton Woznikowicz mean anything to you?” I asked her.

“Anton Wozni—whatsis?”

“Woznikowicz.”

“Wooznookoowhich?” When it came to music and languages, Naomi had a tin ear. Where I’d aced French our freshman year, she’d flunked it, as well as Russian, Spanish, and Italian. By our senior year, she was desperate to fulfill the college’s foreign language requirement. Fortunately for her, Latin was not a spoken language.

“No, Woz-ni-ko-wicz. Just like it’s spelled.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“How about Harlan Coombs?”

There was a long silence. “Don’t tell me you’re getting involved with that sort of thing again? Really, Ann, I thought you were trying to be an honest housepainter.”

“Just answer the question, Naomi,” I said through clenched teeth. Naomi was always primed to assume that I would slip back into criminality if given the chance. “I take it you’ve heard of him?”

“Who hasn’t? He was only the city’s foremost art dealer until he absconded with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of valuable drawings. You of all people should know that.”

“I only know what I read in the papers, Naomi. Did the museum buy from him? I mean, before anyone knew what he was up to?”

There was another pause and I tried to figure out how these recent events were connected. What did Dupont’s death, Ernst’s absence, and the fake Caravaggio have to do with Harlan Coombs and the stolen drawings? And how in the world had Anton gotten himself mixed up in the whole mess?

“Coombs was here a few weeks ago,” Naomi said slowly. “That was when, as far as we knew, he was still legitimate. Then the police were here asking about him. Before the murder, I mean. They were here again today, of course. It makes it so hard to get anything done—”

“What did Coombs want?” I interrupted.

“I presume he was meeting with Acquisitions. We’ve done business with him for years. No one had any reason to doubt his character. Well, listen, Ann—I’ve got to run. Things are pretty crazy around here. Can’t yak all day on the phone like some folks.”

I bit my tongue and reminded myself that Naomi wasn’t evil, she was just clueless and self-absorbed. I was about to hang up when I remembered to ask about Ernst.

“Ernst Pettigrew?” she asked. “He hasn’t come in today. Probably has that flu that’s going around.”

He seemed healthy enough last night at the Brock,
I thought. Maybe it was a twenty-four-hour, avoid-the-police kind of flu. “Do you have his home number?”