The Forger (44 page)

I continued on through the twilight and into the night, toward the coast of Normandy. Across the moonlit fields, I saw the lights of distant towns out in the dark, where streetlamps pooled their glow on empty roads.

*   *   *

T
HAT WAS MORE THAN
half a century ago.

I returned to America on a hospital ship in September 1944.

In 1946, I took a job teaching art at a school in Narragansett, just down the road from where I grew up. I taught for the next thirty years. In 1950, I got married to a woman named Catherine, who was another teacher at the school. Over the next five years, we had two children. I continued to paint, and if my life’s work was more complicated than those around me knew, I kept it to myself.

The only souvenir I had from my time in Paris was Fleury’s glasses. Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would put them on and feel the pull in my eyes as they tried to focus into Fleury’s blurry world.

I never found out what happened to the forgery. I often wondered where it was and what had become of Thomas Dietrich.

Madame Pontier became a national hero in France. For many years after the war, I often saw her still-unsmiling face in the gray haze of newspaper pictures.

I kept in touch with Pankratov. I last saw him in Paris in the late fifties. He and Valya were still running his atelier, although Valya didn’t model any more. They used to joke that they were the only people who could put up with each other, and they were probably right. Valya managed the books and made sure he didn’t chase away all his students by acting crazy. He still went down to Ivan’s every morning, and the two of them carried on much as they had before the war. Pankratov and Ivan both died in 1960, within a few months of each other.

The Gottheim Collection never surfaced. By the time Tombeau returned from Pankratov’s warehouse with the Vermeer, the Fabry-Georges had taken everything and disappeared. Over the years, a few of the works appeared at auctions, their sources listed as anonymous. The authenticity of the paintings were often disputed, since few people believed that the collection had in fact survived.

Last year, I saw Pankratov’s
Valya
pictured in a Christie’s auction catalogue. It was unsigned and the catalogue listed the painter as unknown. I attended the auction, bid on the painting, and acquired it. The bidding went high. I found myself in competition with one other unidentified bidder who participated by closed-circuit TV. During the auction, I turned to look at a camera through which this bidder was viewing the proceedings. Immediately after, the other person dropped out. At the end of the sale, I inquired whether I might be able to know the name of the other bidder, but was told that would not be possible. I think it was Dietrich. I remembered what he had said about seeing me on the other side and thought how, in a strange way, he might have been right after all.

Until the auction, I’d never had a chance to study the work up close. In it, Valya was sitting on a plain wood bench in a room with white-painted walls, wearing a blue dress. Her red-brown hair was pony-tailed and her little buckle shoes had geometric patterns cut into the leather of the toes. The colors were bright, seeming almost to vibrate. It was strange to see such beauty from a man as gruff and coarse as Pankratov.

My wife and I donated the painting to the Musée Duarte, with a plaque on the frame that read: “
Valya,
by Alexander Pankratov. In Memory of Guillaume Fleury.” We had a very small ceremony at the Duarte, with the museum director, Valya, Cath and me.

“I never really knew Fleury,” Valya said to Cath. “He was always just that funny little man.” She had brought along Pankratov’s canvas chair. The museum director allowed it to be placed beside a viewing bench that faced Pankratov’s painting.

As we left, I watched a group of students fanning out through the museum, paper in hand, ready to draw their assignments. A young woman settled into Pankratov’s chair and began a sketch of
Valya.

We said our good-byes.

That evening, I took a walk alone in the honeyed sunset light. I went as far as the Gare St. Lazarre and stood at the end of the main platform, watching the trains pull in and out. I felt the hot breath of the engines passing by.

I won’t be coming back again. Until this day, those few years I spent in Paris had always been my great unfinished business, scattered amongst unconsummated loves and half-grasped revelations. I have lived in quiet, patient hope for the moment to arrive that would mark the end and the beginning of this dream I had when I was young.

Now it is time to go home.

A NOTE ON TWO OF THE PAINTINGS IN THE TEXT

Portrait of a Young Girl,
painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, possibly as early as 1520, was acquired by the Louvre in 1910. Although it is widely believed to be a painting of the daughter of Martin Luther, who was born in 1529, the style of the painting is closer to Cranach’s work in the early 1520s, so the identity of the subject remains in question.
*

The Astronomer,
painted by Johannes Vermeer c. 1668, became part of the collection of the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild in 1907. At the time of the German invasion, the painting was in the collection of Baron Edouard de Rothschild in France, where it was seized by the ERR. It was taken to the Jeu de Paume, declared to be the property of the Third Reich, and was then transported by train to Germany in a crate marked H13, indicating that it was designated to be part of Hitler’s private collection. On November 13, 1940, Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, wrote a letter to Martin Bormann, Hitler’s financial secretary, announcing the find and mentioning Hitler’s special interest in the painting. The painting was returned to France at the end of the war and was shown in the Exhibition of Masterpieces from French Collections Recovered from Germany, held at the Orangerie in Paris in 1946.
†

Although many of the other paintings and drawings mentioned in this book do exist, their roles are entirely fictitious. Any correspondence with their actual history during the time period of the novel is accidental and unintentional.

*
Source: Max Friedlander and Jakob Rosenberg,
Lucas Cranach
(New York: Tabard Press, 1978).

†
Sources: Hector Feliciano,
The Lost Museum
(New York: HarperCollins/Basic Books, 1997). Ludwig Goldscheider,
Johannes Vermeer, Gemalde Gesamtausgabe
(Cologne: Phaidon Verlag, 1958).

A
LSO BY
P
AUL
W
ATKINS

Night Over Day Over Night

Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

In the Blue Light of African Dreams

The Promise of Light

Stand Before Your God

Archangel

The Story of My Disappearance

THE FORGER.
Copyright © 2000 by Paul Watkins. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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FRONTISPIECE
:

The Astronomer,
1668 (oil on canvas) by Jan Vermeer (1632–75)

The Louvre, Paris, France/RMN/Bulloz/Bridgeman Art Library

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First Edition: November 2000

eISBN 9781466887671

First eBook edition: November 2014