The Chrysalis (3 page)

four

NEW YORK CITY, PRESENT DAY

J
UST BEFORE
4:00
P.M. THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, MARA PAUSED
at the entrance to Beazley's. She had passed the mansion before and marveled at its design, a fanciful construct of its former owner, a nineteenth-century coal baron. But she had a different appreciation for its grand scale now that she stood on its steps, poised to enter the massive front doors.

Once inside, she found her way across the festooned lobby by weaving through the bevy of female assistants in charge of setting up the auction and festivities. Almost all of them sported pin-straight, shiny hair, pearls, the latest Manolos, and headsets. They were preoccupied and utterly oblivious to her. Mara had chosen a black Calvin Klein sheath with a figure-skimming jacket for the event, but she felt dowdy compared to everyone else.

After checking in with a formidable receptionist, Mara sat down on one of the scattered chairs covered in blue brocade. She eyed the collection of auction catalogs that were fanned out expertly on the marble coffee table. Though wary of disrupting the display, she slid out the Dutch auction catalog.

The glossy publication contained painting after painting of vast light-filled churches, serene domesticity, minutely crafted still lifes, and bucolic scenes of villagers: all the subjects that made the Dutch artists famous and their artwork coveted. Mara recognized certain pictures and artists. The night before, she had pored through her musty college art history books, trying to refamiliarize herself with the golden age of Dutch painting so that she could speak intelligently to Michael about the auction's artwork. Her crash course reminded her why the seventeenth-century Dutch artists once captivated her: Their exquisite, unprecedentedly realistic paintings were rife with symbols and puzzles, something Nana would have loved. She had scoured through her textbooks trying to determine where
The Chrysalis
's creator, Johannes Miereveld, primarily known as a gifted portraitist, belonged amid the pantheon of artists, but his approach didn't fit into any of his contemporaries' molds.

As Mara perused the catalog, fragments of a hushed conversation drifted into her awareness. The conspiratorial tones piqued her interest, and she strained to see the speakers without being seen herself. She leaned forward to replace the catalog on the coffee table and glanced over at two men waiting on a nearby couch, with their backs to her.

“I hear that Masterson's is being accused of putting up a Hebborn for auction,” she heard one man whisper to the other. Though she was unfamiliar with what she assumed was the artist's name, Mara had become acquainted with the art auction house Masterson's over the previous few days. The firm was Beazley's fiercest rival.

“Let me guess. A Hebborn that looks like a Corot?” the other man murmured back.

“Who knows? It could be a Hebborn that resembles a Mantegna or a Tiepolo.”

Suddenly, Mara realized that the two men must be talking about a master forger.

“Well, I know that I wouldn't want anyone looking too closely at the ‘Castigliones' we've sold in the past.”

Mara listened to the two men chortle at the thought. Engrossed in their tête-à-tête, she jumped when Michael tapped her shoulder. She looked up and noticed that his cowlick dipped down as he stooped to greet her and that the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled. Mara admonished herself. The evening before, she had given herself a stern talking-to: She acknowledged her attraction to Michael, but she reminded herself that she had a clear line to walk and a professional relationship to build. She knew she couldn't strike that balance if she allowed herself a physical reaction to him.

He shepherded her into his office, which was aglow with the afternoon sun. His antique captain's desk of gleaming wood and brass fittings sailed on the waves of a richly hued Aubusson rug and cast its sights on a panoramic view of Central Park. The walls were buttery suede and covered with art. On a prominent wall closest to his desk hung several black-and-white sketches of a man in robes. The subject seemed familiar to Mara, and when she asked Michael about them, he told her they were drawings of Saint Peter by a Renaissance artist with whom she was unfamiliar.

Arms crossed, Michael rested against his office door; he was clearly awaiting her reaction. Mara had given up her romantic delusions of a book-lined, mahogany-paneled lawyer's office long before, and she was having a hard time imagining the luck of working in this richness. As she ambled around the room, running her fingers along shelves and tabletops, the compliments tumbled out one on top of the other.

He beamed a charmingly sheepish smile. “Thanks, I'm almost embarrassed by it sometimes, especially after six years behind that banged-up metal desk at Ellis. Unlike my former white-shoe partners who found it appropriate for the associates to work in squalor, my patrons here expect to see us surrounded by exquisite objects…even if they're just on loan.”

Michael launched into the day's schedule, and Mara noted, with both relief and a hint of disappointment, that his tone was friendly but businesslike. He informed her that her day would culminate with a meeting with the Provenance Department chief, Lillian Joyce, a woman he characterized as prickly. She served as Beazley's ultimate gatekeeper: It was her job to guarantee the untainted pedigree of all the artwork that passed through the institution, and she would assure Mara of the purity of
The Chrysalis
's title.

Michael's words faded into the background as Mara's eyes cast about for any clues that would help her read this man. The snoop in her longed to study the bookshelves, examine the photographs, and paw through drawers. Was there a story behind the jade Fu dogs that served as bookends or the richly carved teakwood elephant collection on an end table? Where and when had he acquired such beautiful exotic objects? Had he done a lot of traveling? Did he travel alone? Or did all the items come from Beazley's coffers? She realized that, in fact, she had learned very little about the adult Michael over dinner, then told herself that two professionals having dinner
should
learn very little about each others' personal lives. If anything, she had perhaps learned way too much.

“If you're not too tired after all that,” she heard him saying, “I'm hoping you'll join me at the cocktail party and the auction?”

Mara nodded. In spite of herself, she was happy that he hadn't forgotten his original invitation.

After brief, futile meetings with the operations and auction departments, Mara rejoined Michael for their appointment with Lillian. They entered a conference room, unlike any meeting space Mara had ever encountered. Three walls covered with priceless carved antique cherry paneling enclosed a phalanx of French doors that opened onto a flagstone terrace looking over the park. A John Singer Sargent portrait of a well-dressed man who had to be Beazley's founder presided at the head of an impossibly long boardroom table, while Impressionist paintings, a Cassatt, a Seurat, and a tiny Renoir adorned the remaining walls.

Mara held out her hand to greet Lillian, who wore an immaculately tailored navy skirt suit that was somehow au courant and classic at once. If she overlooked the severity of the tight chignon of thick, silvery hair and the harsh slash of deep red lipstick, Mara found Lillian attractive, particularly her piercing, nearly turquoise eyes. She certainly looked younger than what Mara had assumed, given her years at Beazley's. But she very quickly understood Michael's “prickly” label. Lillian's terse welcome and brusque handshake conveyed the fact that she both begrudged the time spent away from her research and resented the implicit challenge to her work.

In contrast, however, Lillian bestowed a grandmotherly kiss upon Michael's cheek and even allowed him to snake his arm around the back of her chair in a protective nonembrace once they settled at the table. Mara understood now why he had deemed it necessary to attend this meeting as opposed to the others: His presence was a peace offering to Lillian.

Lillian began with a primer on the provenance search. “A provenance is the history of ownership of a prized object.” Lillian spoke as if reading from a textbook, her accent clipped in the mixed British and New England manner of the stars of Hollywood's golden era. “A completed provenance search results in a document, which enumerates the known owners of the object. Sometimes this document is combined with a list of the scholarly literature where the object is mentioned and the exhibitions where it has been displayed.”

“How do you create a provenance?” Mara jumped in. She wanted to manage this meeting in her standard take-charge fashion.

Lillian, however, refused to fall back in the face of Mara's attempt at control. She paused for a moment, and then, when she resumed, her voice dripped with condescension. “Let's not be hasty, Ms. Coyne. That's a very difficult question. I'll answer it as best I can, in my time, in a simple way that you will surely be able to understand.”

Mara yielded to Lillian and listened without further interruption. She settled into her chair and folded her hands in her lap. Lillian, meanwhile, sat up more erectly and returned to her practiced presentation. Mara felt as if she, not just Hilda Baum, were the enemy. “We have here at Beazley's one of the world's most extensive collections of documents dedicated to provenance outside of certain world-class museums and universities. We deliver to our clients a guarantee that our artwork's lineage is clear, and this is among the reasons we are considered one of the country's premier auction houses. That's the goal of my research team, all of whom I require to have Ph.D.'s in art history. Their job is to ferret out all references to a piece of artwork that are available. I know it may sound rather peculiar to you, but our researchers must love combing through all types of historical documents, no matter how obscure, to find clues to the art's earlier whereabouts.” She paused, waiting for a response from Mara that ensured she understood the magnitude and intricacy of the work they performed.

Mara weighed her next remark carefully before speaking. “Ms. Joyce, it doesn't sound odd at all. It's very similar to how we lawyers prepare for a brief or an argument: We, too, pore through countless documents—in our case, legal decisions and treatises—hoping to find that one key piece of support for our proposition. Rummaging through historical documents, I must admit, sounds a lot more interesting.”

Lillian softened a bit as she enumerated the categories of documents in which the history of an artwork's ownership might be found: home inventories, dowry lists, auction sale catalogs, bills of sale, museum provenance files, indexes to paintings in public collections, governmental records, collectors' files. Michael registered in Mara's peripheral vision from time to time, though she locked in on Lillian's lesson by sheer dint of will and a certain fear of her instructor.

Lillian finished and indicated that she would hear Mara's questions.

“Ms. Joyce,” Mara began, “would I be wrong in assuming that you have a computer index of some sort, that you wouldn't have to look through each and every document in a particular category?”

Lillian nodded. “Your assumption is correct. Each category of documents has its own word-searchable index, which is organized by type of artwork, owner, country, time period, artist, title, subject matter, even size of the painting and color of the paint.”

“Are many of the documents comprising the index loaded onto a database?”

“Yes, we call it PROVID, for Provenance Index Database. We are just finalizing it now.”

Lillian moved the conversation into the historical realm of the Baums. “With the Nazi-era artwork, the process of documenting provenance becomes much more complicated, particularly since the Nazis may have confiscated approximately 20 percent of the world's Western artwork. But I've probably jumped ahead a bit. Do you know what I mean by Nazi-era artwork?”

“No.”

“It is artwork acquired after 1932 and created before 1946 that changed hands during those years and was, or could have been, in continental Europe during that time. But before we go into the provenance process for the Nazi era, you need to understand the historical context.” Her voice quavering a bit, Lillian described Hitler's obsession with the arts and the resultant Nazi art lust. A failed artist himself, Hitler believed that, as the ultimate leader of the “superior” Aryan race, he needed to involve himself in even the smallest aesthetic details of his domain. He dreamed of a Germanic empire, in which all “degenerate” artwork—including such modern movements as Impressionism or works created by artists who were either religiously, politically, or racially “incorrect,” such as Jews or Catholics—was purged and only Aryan dogma displayed. For Hitler, the only art that counted was the brown, varnished Germanic art or art celebrating “proper” ideals, such as domestic tranquillity or the heroic Germanic past of the Valkyries.