The Forgery of Venus (26 page)

“Yes, but perhaps that is the case only in your paranoid ideation. Suppose, however, that in truth you are a well-known and famous artist, whose work routinely sells in the six figures, and that all these memories of failure and frustration are part of the psychosis.”

And now that whole New York thing, which I had been repressing all this time, came snarling out of its box and started tearing big chunks out of my sense of who I was. The result was paralyzing terror. What did I know? Montaigne’s question, and I couldn’t answer it. I shook. I sweated. I shut down: the traffic sounds and Krebs’s voice seemed to come through thick insulation.

“Wilmot,” he said, in that same calm professional voice, “believe me when I say that although you are a brilliant painter, you have no way of distinguishing what is real from what is the product of your afflicted brain and of the drug you were given.”

“We went to see those gangsters,” I said dully. “I was pushed in front of a bus. I remember that.”

“Yes, this is how you interpret your appearance before, let us say, a mental health commitment board—international gangsters. And you
jumped
in front of the bus, Wilmot. This is why Franco must follow you everywhere. You could have been badly injured. Well, in any case, here we are at the airport.”

“I’m not talking to you anymore,” I said.

He smiled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, “but we shall see what happens. It is early days yet in our relationship.”

They led me out of the car and onto a plane; I did as I was told, without will, moving slowly like one of those sad brain-damaged vets you see in the documentaries, and we flew out of Spain on an elegant little thing, a six-passenger job carrying me, Krebs, Franco, and Kellermann. Kellermann slept in the rear the whole way, snoring; Franco was next to me and Krebs was up front talking on his cell phone in German.

“Franco,” I said when we were up in cloudland, “tell me, did you get a look at the guy who pushed me in front of the bus?”

“What guy?” he answered. “You jumped.”

Stupid to ask, really, Franco a faithful servant of the king. Although Krebs had said he wasn’t, that he worked for the bad guys. Who knew? Was that the first mirror in the hall of mirrors? Were there bad guys at all?

I reclined my seat and tried not to think about anything. It’s harder than it sounds, although apparently the holy men do it all the time. It must be very restful, not to think.

W
e landed, we got in a big Mercedes, just me and Krebs and Franco—Kellermann had been assigned some errand—and we drove north on the A9 autobahn. It’s nice to drive in a powerful car on the German autobahn: there are no speed limits and the peasants are wise enough to keep out of the left lane. I got a kick out of the big blue signs that read
Ausfahrt Dachau;
gotta love the Germans—they’re sorry, but not
that
sorry, not sorry enough to change the name of a town that’s a curse in every other civilized country. I mentioned this to Krebs, who gave me the kind of look you give to kids who mention poo-poo at the dinner table, and then he started talking about where we were going, a part of Bavaria known as the Fränkische Alb, a real beauty spot apparently, quite isolated even in crowded Germany. His father had bought the house just after the war, along with a substantial area of surrounding land. Much of the neighborhood was a nature preserve, but he had fishing and hunting rights on his own land. Did I like to fish? To hunt?

I said I did, and was this part of my therapy?

“Of course,” he said genially. “Everything is part of therapy. But I think the best thing will be if you have your family around you. I have been in contact with your ex-wife and she has agreed to visit. I am truly looking forward to meeting your children.”

At which point I started to cry.

I sat in that car, slumped in a corner with my temple against the cool glass, watching the sweat and tears flow down the window, thinking, Oh, yeah, I bet he was looking forward to meeting my kids, then he’d have total control over me, the master manipulator. Who did I think he was—right, the question Jesus asked his disciples, but in my case no answer came. Rolling through the possibilities in my mind, logic a comfort, a sign that the brain’s still functioning. No, actually,
maniacs are flawlessly logical, it’s their premises that are false. Dredging up memories, my Cartesian theater lit up and roaring, all the crap jobs I’d done, the details of the paintings, my loft, the meals I’d eaten, cubic yards of Chinese food and pizza, the children in the loft, the move to Brooklyn, the furniture of our house, my life with Lotte, the agony of our divorce…Yeah, it was there in my head, solid, reliable, visuals, audio, even smells, twenty years of life.

And then I recalled my life as Velázquez and it was the same: grinding pigments; laying on the paint; my wife, Juana; talking with my teacher and father-in-law, Pacheco; walking with the king in the gardens of Buen Retiro, painting him, his ugly, gentle face, all just as real. Besides that, I have the same vivid memories of a whole year that never happened to me, and no memories at all of three months that did, apparently. And I knew it couldn’t be real, so what good was memory? It was no good at all, and without that existential confidence, I was
nothing,
I was in there with the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, deep brain malfunction, like those people who think their wives are robots sent from the CIA.

Other explanations? A gigantic conspiracy? Terrific, that’s not just schizophrenia, that’s
paranoid
schizophrenia. Paranoia’s related to memory, that’s clear, Alzheimer’s patients attacking their kids, becoming suspicious, who are all these strangers pretending to love me? Happening to me too, inevitable. And Shelly Zubkoff—did
that
really happen at all, or was that a fantasy too, an excuse to retreat from reality, like the CIA rays that make necessary the wearing of tinfoil helmets?

Why would Krebs do such a thing? If he’s Krebs the criminal, why am I still with him? He’s got the painting. A handshake and good-bye for Wilmot would be more to the point, or a knock on the head—thinking of Eric Hebborn, greatest faker of the last century, besides me, had his head cracked open in Rome, murder never solved. How would someone like Krebs handle forgers who’ve outlived their
usefulness? He’s planning to kill me in his secret mountain laboratory? No, Franco saved me, and Franco works for Krebs. Unless Franco
pushed
me and then pretended to save me, so that I’d be scared, so that I’d stick with Krebs, a docile tool, and get my family into his clutches. Again, if true, why? And then, why rig up this dark legion of background heavies, that interview, maybe it was a setup entirely, a show with actors, so that I’d see Krebs as my protector instead of my persecutor—but why go through all that trouble, like I wouldn’t do what he wants out of simple fear? I
would,
I admit it, I’m a total chicken.

But all this is just what a paranoid maniac
would
think, the desperate attempt of a mind unhinged to seek some rational explanation that doesn’t involve the One Big Fact: that everything I remember about the last few decades of my life is false. That I’m Someone Else. So my thoughts go around and around, Krebs sitting next to me; I’m a silk-wrapped fly in his web. I can’t look at him.

Meanwhile, underneath all these thoughts, like a suppurating ulcer you can’t stand to look at, was what happened in New York, those paintings. That was real all right, and an insinuating voice in my head was saying, Oh, Chaz, come back, come back to your real and only life.

Right, shit, it’s easy to sit here and recount or try to recount what went through my head on that fucking car ride, but it’s a lot harder to recapture the feelings, the hamster in a wire wheel spinning, the car on black ice out of control. What I did eventually was breathe slow and deep and contemplate the glories of nature. Not all that glorious on the autobahn, mainly a blur, but we turned off onto a secondary road south of Ingolstadt and drove on west into the sun. The day had begun cloudy but cleared up later in the afternoon, a spring day in the ancient heart of Europe, forests of dark spruce and beech just coming into leaf, that ravishing pale green hard to get with paint, too easy to make it acid, chloriney, tube colors no good, you have to use a very pale gray undercoat and work it in with greens you make out of ultra
marine and chrome yellow, thin washes over the off-white, marvelous against the almost blacky green of the spruces, and there were fields of intense violent yellow rapeseed, and other fields just greening up with grain, and the shadows of the clouds flying over them a different light show every minute.

Every so often we slid through a town, old squares lined by half-timbered houses with overhanging roofs, and the churches of the local stone with their clocked steeples mosaicked with stones of different colors, some wonderful anonymous artists of the baroque, and it made me feel good to see that. Later the towns came more infrequently and the land rose a thousand feet or so; the forest closed in on the road, and we turned in to the forest itself, dark with shafts of light shooting down through the trees, reddening as the sun got lower, the kind of effect that was transcendent in the baroque and kitsch in the late nineteenth century, acres of Teutonic landscapes stuffing third-rate museums. Then down an
allée
of beeches entwined overhead, and at last the house.

I suppose I had imagined a Dracula castle, black sweating stone with Gothic turrets and gargoyles, but this was just a large, three-story Bavarian house, with the usual sharply peaked, hipped roof and half-timbering. I wanted it to exude an air of menace, but it just sat there, clumsy and plain as pumpernickel. It might have originally been the manor house of a substantial estate. There were some outbuildings in a more modern style clustered around it; one was a garage. Franco stopped the car in front of it and we all got out.

Just like on
Masterpiece Theater,
I was glad to see, the staff gathered at the front door to greet the returning master. Two middle-aged people, Herr and Frau Bieneke, she the housekeeper, he the majordomo, butler, whatever you call it, plain and competent looking; a couple of young housemaids, Liesl and Gerda, goggling at me shyly; the cook, Frau Bonner, in apron, red and damp faced; and two men, Revich
and Macek, Slavic in appearance, whose duties were not defined but who were obviously the muscle. Krebs made the intros with seigneurial graciousness; the staff nodded, smiled; I nodded, smiled. Everyone had very good teeth. We went inside, and Krebs left me in the hands of Herr Bieneke to show me my rooms and the layout.

We went through the entrance foyer into what seemed to be the main hall, and here my imagination was at last satisfied: flagged floors with scattered Oriental rugs, heavy black furnishings with studded red leather upholstery, a stone fireplace, deer antlers up and down the walls with a couple of boars’ heads mounted among them, a full suit of armor standing in one corner, and over the fireplace a vast trophy, a shield with a coat of arms on it and a dozen or so swords and pole-arms. A bearskin with snarling head lay in front of the fireplace to complete the Teutonic splendorama.

I got the whole tour. Top floor servants’ quarters, Bieneke and the frau live in a farmhouse on the property. The master has his suite, office, bedroom, study, on the ground floor; I was shown the door, but not the inside. At the back of the house, a wonder, a huge artist’s studio; the man tells me that Herr Krebs’s father added it to the house. A wall of windows connecting to a skylight two floors above, a professional easel, the usual worktables, cabinets. Signs of long-ago painting, faded spatters, but no sniff of turps, no one has used this room in a long time. I ask. The old man painted a little, and Herr Krebs when young, but not recently. Interesting.

Below the main floor are the kitchen, storerooms, the usual, and a door in the back leading to the basement. We descend the stairs. All old stonework, original, must be seventeenth century at least, arches and niches suitable for hogsheads of wine and beer, now filled with wine racks and central heating equipment. In a corner I see a small ironbound door, low, set into the wall, looks original to the house. What’s down there? Nothing, sir, an old well, dangerous, kept locked
at all times. Aha, there’s the secret, I thought, the Bluebeard room, where the dead wives are kept, the Nazi memorabilia, the crates of gold coins.

Then up a staircase with heavy carved banisters to the second floor and down a hall to a room, mine. Nice room, simply furnished: a wooden bed with posts, checked bedspread, goosefeather pillows, a desk, chair, the usual lamps, a door to a bathroom, fortunately the latest, not at all what you’d expect, obviously a great deal of expensive renovations in the recent past.

Dinner was me and Krebs, served by the two girls, decent heavy food, soup, chops, spaetzle, a rich cake. Conversation sputtered a little; I was almost mute, because if you’re no one, you don’t have much to say. So he gave me a history of the house, it dated from 1694, the country seat of a servant of the Bavarian monarchy. Extensively modified, of course. He went on about the delights of the countryside, the seasons. He hunts boar and will take me if I like, if I am still here in the fall. Or there is a river, we can catch trout. I didn’t object to his assumption that I would be an indefinite guest. No more talk about psychiatry. We’re pals now. The wine helped. I drank most of a bottle of Rh
ne.