The Forgery of Venus (24 page)

T
wo days later we moved to Madrid, occupying a couple of suites at the Villa Real. Our party was made up of the king (Krebs), the First Murderer (Franco), the Fool (me), and a new guy, the Second Murderer (Kellermann), who met us at the Madrid airport in the usual gangster Mercedes limo. I gathered he was an employee at Krebs’s secret mountain hideout in Bavaria, a large, polite blondie with nice teeth. Franco had nice teeth too, which you usually don’t see on Europeans. I asked him about it once and he told me that Herr Krebs insists on good dental care for all his staff, pays for it out of his own pocket. An unashamed patron is Herr Krebs, and it wouldn’t surprise me much to learn he arranged their marriages too.

All in all it was kind of neat to be part of Herr Krebs’s little court. The life of an international criminal is not a strenuous one, which is why it’s so popular. We rose late, ate well; Krebs and I toured the galleries and museums, strolled the temperate plazas at night, and ate tapas and heard music and discussed art on a high level.

Yes, nice indeed to be driven in a limo everywhere and to stay in this really snazzy hotel and never have to wonder about where you’re going. It was not that great being an American in Spain since the Iraq shit started and the Madrid metro bombings, and I detected dirty looks, subtle rudenesses, and obscene comments behind the backs of the Americans I saw strolling obliviously around this hotel.

Which was five-star, naturally, old on the outside, sleek as a fighter
jet on the inside, furnished in leather and brushed steel, wired to the gills. Krebs told me I couldn’t make phone calls without permission, and I haven’t, but he didn’t say anything about e-mail. We had Wi-Fi in our suite and I was able to cruise the Web (all those sites about memory and craziness, although there does not seem to be an organization devoted to fixing what’s wrong with me) and communicate with my children, chatty e-mails from Milo with links to cool websites and videos, and from Rose I got, “hEllo DadDDy I am FIIN” with little drawing-program pictures attached. Lotte didn’t answer the ones I sent her.

And then one night we drove out to the west end of the city, to a commercial street on the other side of Bailén. In a vacant loft, lit bright as day by big portable worklights, we found a couple of familiar faces, Baldassare and Salinas from the Palacio de Livia museum. Salinas informed us that the tests of the paint samples had been perfect; the little scrape was chemically indistinguishable from similar ones taken from undoubted Velázquez paintings. He seemed sad when he said this—maybe he was having second thoughts, or maybe it was his curatorial faith in technology receiving a deadly blow. Anyway, we were obviously on to the next phase.

On a couple of big glass-topped tables pushed together I saw my
Venus
and another painting, just the same size, that looked a lot like
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes
by Jacopo Bassano, which hangs in the National Gallery in D.C. Both paintings had been taken off their stretchers and were laid flat on the tables, the Bassano weighted taut with small leather shot bags. I noticed that the fake Velázquez had been adhered in some way to a thick glass sheet somewhat larger than the painting. The air in the loft was close and smelled of old building, turps, and some chemical I couldn’t identify.

“What’s going on, Werner?” I asked.

“Well, you see we have your wonderful painting, but, as I’ve told
you, however wonderful it is, it will not pass as genuine unless it has a flawless provenance. What do you think of the other painting?”

“It looks like a Bassano,” I said.

“Yes, but which one? He had four sons, all painters, and the work from their hands is not nearly as valuable as the father’s.”

“The story of my life,” I said, “but this one looks a lot like the one in Washington. It’s a nice painting. How do you tell the various Bassanos apart anyway?”

“It’s almost impossible without evidence from provenance. But this particular painting was in fact sold as a Jacopo to the duke of Alba in 1687. It’s been in the family’s possession ever since, and so its provenance is as good as any provenance can be.”

“Yeah, but what does that have to do with the Velázquez?” I said, and then I yelled.

Baldassare had taken a wide brush full of thick white paint and wiped a line right across my fake
Venus,
and a second later I realized why he’d done it and why we were all there. Baldassare gave me a smirk and continued to paint over the nude.

“You’re going to lift the Bassano and adhere it on top of the
Venus
,” I said, and the sweat popped out all over my face and scalp. Now at last this was the thing itself, the patent act of fraud, no more horseshit about indistinguishable works of art and buyer beware and who are we hurting. And that’s why we all had to be there, the same reason why a junior mafioso has to make his bones before he becomes a made guy. I had to get dirty.

“Yes, we are,” Krebs said. “Only it’s not a Bassano at all.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s the work of your most illustrious predecessor, Luca Giordano. Underneath the surface is his signature. The duke was fooled, and this time Luca did not confess. The thing has been hanging as a Bassano for three hundred years, until Salinas here had it cleaned and
X-rayed as a matter of routine. He saw the signature of the faker and called me.”

“Why?” I asked. I was watching Baldassare obliterate my painting with what I presumed was the finest seventeenth-century flake white.

“Because of the provenance. Our curator here has just discovered that a painting worth perhaps a quarter of a million euros is now worth no more than twenty thousand. This happens in museums all the time. Sometimes they continue to hang the painting with a revised attribution, school of so-and-so, for example. Sometimes they sell it. Salinas decided that the painting should be sold. Now, he conspires to commit a little fraud of his own, this naughty man, with the connivance of his superiors at the museum, of course. Suppose that he puts the painting on the market discreetly as a Jacopo Bassano. Americans love old masters, and one of them is sure to want this one. So Salinas calls our friend Mark Slade.”

“Who else?”

“Yes, and if an American can be gulled, so much the better. Who likes Americans nowadays? Perhaps you have noticed this, eh? Yes, very sad. And Mark is a good choice in another way. He specializes in very private sales to rich Yankees by museums in need of cash. All museums have too many pictures to show, second-rate pieces cluttering the basement, and they don’t like going to the auction houses because they don’t want to be accused of selling off the national patrimony or the endowed collection of some rich fool. So discretion is very important.”

Baldassare had by this time sprayed the surface of the Bassano with a clear substance. He carefully flipped it over facedown on a large plate of thin glass, a few inches larger on all sides than the painting, and reweighted it. Now he brushed the back of the canvas with a chemical whose scent I did not recognize but that had to be some
kind of sophisticated solvent. Then we waited.

I wandered out of the glare and found that they’d supplied the forgery headquarters with a number of leather lounge chairs, a low table, and a large cooler full of beer and cold tapas. The furniture was all brand-new, down to the price stickers, and the refreshments were first class. I recalled what Krebs had said about the investment of his silent partners: someone was spending money without stint on this one.

Baldassare laid out the spread of food and drink and then dragged one of the chairs into the shadows and lay down. Krebs and Salinas were conversing quietly in Spanish, a conversation to which I was clearly not invited, and it was equally clear that Baldassare did not want to chat with me. I brought out my sketchbook and drew the scene, a less dramatic version of
Vulcan’s Forge
by Velázquez, and wondered what would happen if the cops burst in instead of Apollo.

Which didn’t happen. After a couple of hours a little alarm buzzed on Baldassare’s watch and we all got up to check out the tables. Baldassare and Salinas donned surgical gloves, and with steel spatulas the two men slowly pried the old canvas up from the paint layer of the Bassano. It took a while. Except for brief exchanges between the two men at work, all was silent. When the canvas was at last peeled away I could see only the bottom layer of the underpainting—the image was facedown on the glass sheet. Baldassare picked this up by its edges, rotated it, and then, with painstaking care, let it down on the damp layer of flake white covering the forgery. Jesus and the startled fishermen shone out through the glass. He then clamped the edges of the two glass sheets together with small steel clips.

“What do you think?” Krebs asked Baldassare.

“It’s good. I will squirt some solvent in there to release the glass over the top painting, then a few days in the oven, a little chemical treatment, a little wash, and you will have a wonderful sandwich. Then we take the bottom glass off and I’ll nail it to the original Bas
sano stretchers. Not more than four or five days.”

Handshakes all around, and we left Baldassare in the loft. In the street there was a car waiting for Salinas. When he’d gone and I was in our car with Krebs, I asked him, “So what’s the plan now?”

“The next phase is moving our painting to market, obviously. Salinas will call Mark. He will show him the painting as a genuine Jacopo of flawless provenance. Mark will ask for an X-ray analysis. In the presence of witnesses, Salinas will object.

“But he
did
X-ray it.”

“Yes, but with a single, highly corruptible technician. There is no record of this X-ray and the technician will not talk. To resume: Salinas will have explained to his management that he did not X-ray it because his curatorial eye told him it was probably a Luca forgery, but as long as this was mere suspicion he had decided to see if he could get a Bassano price out of it. His objection to having it X-rayed will be on record.”

“I’m not getting this,” I said. “Salinas knows the fake Bassano is a Velázquez. His superiors think it’s just a fake Bassano, and that they’re ripping off a stupid American by charging him the full Bassano price. So why does Slotsky go along with not doing an X-ray after he’s made a big deal about asking for one?”

“Oh, he relents, I’m afraid. After the argument, he apologizes to Salinas for doubting the word of a Spanish gentleman and writes out a check for the full Bassano price on the spot. This is also a much-witnessed transaction. The museum board laughs all the way to the bank. Obviously, once he has taken possession and has it back in the States, he decides to X-ray it, again with reliable witnesses, and discovers the hidden Velázquez. This is announced to the world, the process of technical and curatorial examination confirms the authenticity of the work and we go to auction. The Liria is furious of course, but what can they do except fire poor Salinas?”

“Wait a minute—
auction
? You told me this was going to be one of
your discreet sales to a billionaire.”

He smiled and shrugged. “I lied. No, that is not exactly true. Frankly, I had not expected the work to be so very good, and so I assumed that a private sale would have been required. But not for our
Venus,
no, this one will go through the rooms to the highest bidder.”

On the following day I got up early and went down to the lobby of the hotel. We usually breakfast off room service, but today I didn’t feel like eating with Krebs and his two boys, so I said I wanted to eat early and hit the museums. The three big ones—the Prado, the Reina Sophía, and the Thyssen—are within walking distance of the hotel, and I wanted to look at pictures that were probably not all fakes. Krebs waved me off and said, “Franco will go with you. We are going out at two this afternoon.”

“Where to?”

“You’ll see,” he said. “There are some people who want to meet you.”

“What people?”

He smiled and exchanged a glance with Franco. “Have a nice time at the museum,” he said with a dismissive wave.

W
e went to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, which was the nearest. It’s the collection of a Dutch-born Swiss citizen with a Hungarian title who lived most of his life in Spain and was one of the great art collectors of the last century. He liked German expressionists and picked a lot of them up cheap in the thirties when the Nazis (whom his cousin Fritz was helping to finance) cleaned them out of German galleries as degenerate. A nice small collection of post-impressionists and the lesser impressionists and a handful of old masters, among which I was happy to see a Luca Giordano that he broke down and signed with his own name. It’s a
Judgment of Solomon
.
There’s the great king got up in gilded breastplates and blond, just like Alexander the Great—funny, he doesn’t look Jewish—and there are the two contentious women and the executioner holding the live baby uncomfortably by one foot, while he reaches for his sword. It’s a little Rubensy and a little Rembrandty, a typical piece of late-Baroque wallpaper, beautifully drawn, but the expressions are waxworks and the paint surface dreary. The only exception is over to the left, the face of a little dwarf, a marvelous grotesque portrait that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Goya capriccio. The Bassano forgery was a lot better as a painting, the poor bastard.

B
ack in my room, a little depressed now, I had a drink or two from the minibar and watched Bayern play Arsenal on the television, and at a little past noon there came a knock on the door that connected my room to Krebs’s suite and an anouncement that lunch was served. I dined with Krebs, a fish soup and a platter of cold meats, a white wine and beer available.

That day the German papers were full of the uncovering of yet another terrorist plot; we talked about that and I told him about Bosco’s 9/11 installation and the ensuing riot, and he said he would have liked to have seen it. He was firmly on Bosco’s side and said he thought the typical American attitude to the terror attack inane and infantile. Less than three thousand dead and two office buildings destroyed in a nation of three hundred million? It was a joke, and a joke was the appropriate artistic response. Our grotesque reaction was the laughingstock of the world, although people were too polite or too frightened to voice it. Try seven hundred thousand civilian dead in a nation of sixty million, which was what the Germans lost from the Allied bombing, and nearly
every
building destroyed in some places!