The Perfect Landscape (7 page)

“Initially one man was sentenced for three of the paintings, which were attributed to Jon Stefansson. They were clearly forgeries,” Steinn replies. “Then two men were charged with embezzlement and found guilty in the district court, but they took the case to a higher court and were finally sentenced by the High Court to something like two years. But the case as a whole took much longer. Over a hundred paintings were investigated, some watercolors and some oil paintings. The investigation revealed that the majority were probably forged.”

“Were they charged with embezzlement?” asks Hanna. “Not just fraud?”

“Amazingly enough,” says Steinn, looking at the painting, “it turned out it wasn’t possible to charge them with breach of copyright just for selling fraudulent goods. They were found guilty in the district court on up to fifty counts. But then this was overturned in the High Court.”

“How come?”

“Yes, well, the High Court.” Steinn rubs his right eye. “They really went to town with it. The conclusion was that specialist opinions were not relevant in this case because the specialists were also the ones bringing the charges. Which wasn’t even true.”

Thinking like a fencer, Hanna immediately sees the next move. “So wasn’t the district court verdict also dismissed and other specialists brought in? Wasn’t the case reopened?”

“No,” Steinn answers, and they fall silent.

Hanna is disturbed. She followed the case at the time, but being abroad meant she soon forgot about it. Now she reproaches herself for her indifference.

“It was one of the most costly and lengthy cases in Icelandic legal history, and it was a complete fiasco,” Steinn adds, frowning. “Just petered out. And the paintings went straight back into circulation.” There’s a hint of irritation in his voice, yet Steinn generally doesn’t get annoyed at anything.

“Back in circulation!” Hanna doesn’t believe him. “That can’t be right.”

Steinn nods emphatically. “The law doesn’t prevent it.”

Hanna looks back at
The Birches
. Steinn is keen to uncover the truth about this painting. He has been living here and working in the arts, and over recent years he has witnessed justice not being done. Of course it’s intolerable. Steinn is a man who never gives in. Hanna can see herself getting involved in this with him; although the task is far from what she imagined when she took the job as director of the Annexe.

“We need to take a closer look at the ownership history,” Steinn says. “Kristin mentioned that Elisabet bought the painting at an auction of Holst’s estate, but that doesn’t ring true. I’ve asked around.”

Hanna looks at him thoughtfully. “Is that so? Did she say that?” Frowning, she tries to remember what Kristin said at that meeting. Steinn doesn’t wait while she’s thinking.

“It doesn’t matter what she said. The point is that Elisabet bought the painting at a different auction house from the one who auctioned the slaughterer’s estate. That means that someone else bought the painting from his estate and then put it back up for auction. A few months later. With a different auction house.”

“Oh,” says Hanna.

“We need to find the missing link—whoever bought the painting at the first auction. Maybe it was a totally different price then. It’s a pain that auction houses don’t give out that kind of information.”

“Don’t they? Why not?”

Steinn is lost in thought and doesn’t respond, so she doesn’t push it for now. She must be able to find a way forward now that he’s so pessimistic.

The silence between them deepens. Hanna senses his eyes resting on her as though he wants to say something but can’t bring himself to. Not knowing what he is thinking, she starts to feel uncomfortable but can’t ask him straight-out. It’s just the way he is. They’ve only worked together for three weeks, and their private lives have never come up in conversation. Their friendship is purely professional, although it’s also genuine. They don’t know one another well enough for her to ask what’s the matter, what he wants. She will have to work that out for herself, like she worked out that the painting is likely to be a forgery, even though neither of them has said as much out loud.

She looks at the painting on the easel, at the image on the computer screen, at Steinn’s hand on the mouse. Thinking about how Steinn bumped into the doorpost just now, how he leaned forward over the computer screen, how he knocked her
knee, it finally dawns on her what this is all about. She suddenly sees his helpfulness in a new light, his friendliness and kindness and the encouragement he’s given her on a daily basis since she joined.

Now it’s her turn. Steinn needs her support. He can’t do this on his own, and he’s also frightened about something, maybe losing his sight or not being able to do his job properly any longer.

Of course, Hanna’s specialist knowledge of Gudrun’s paintings will play a big part in this. Right from the first day, Steinn realized that they would be ideal brothers in arms. Of course I’ll help you, she thinks. We’re in this together. And what you fear, whatever that is, I’ll be there for you. Nodding her head, she sees his relief. He turns back to the computer.

“Here, look at this. Do you remember? The UV image here shows best of all that something has clearly been tampered with.”

Hanna sits next to him, and now she doesn’t worry about sitting close; in this moment they are comrades. All we need now is to swear an oath, she says to herself, to slice our palms and mingle our blood. She smiles to herself. Steinn would look good with a sword.

“I need to get an X-ray,” he says. “An X-ray might show more clearly what’s underneath, but it’s time-consuming. To do this sort of thing properly, we’d really need to send it abroad. Maybe I can sort something out over here. I’ll look into it. If it becomes apparent that there’s an abstract painting underneath this landscape, then it’s almost certainly a forgery.”

For a moment Steinn hesitates; then, taking a deep breath, he begins talking uncharacteristically fast.

“Then we might just consider whether we should simply wash off the whole of the upper layer.” He breathes out again as if he’d been holding his breath for some time, and Hanna is startled. There it is. What he’d been thinking about all the while. This is what he wants.

“Wash off the entire top layer? But what about Gudrun’s landscape? What will happen to that?” Steinn looks at Hanna and then it dawns on her. The likelihood is there is no landscape of Gudrun’s on this canvas.

Steinn is sure of his case. Now that they’ve started on this journey there’s no turning back. They have to go the whole way, to see it through. In her head she draws her foil out of its sheath, lifts it up, and holds it there at the ready against an unseen enemy.

It’s her job to confirm his conclusions, to examine the images on the screen more carefully, alongside the painting on the easel. It’s up to her to write the report—she’s worried about the response it will trigger, she’s scared to hear something she doesn’t want to hear. Is that why she doesn’t ask Steinn about his eyesight? She sits still. She wasn’t expecting this.

Steinn turns the computer off. Hanna forces herself to move, to stand up. Walking over to the painting, Hanna gazes at the birch grove, as if she’s trying to reach out through time and space and make contact with Gudrun. With the person who painted this landscape. The painting hasn’t changed. The mountain is immovable, the birch trees are finely nuanced, the trunks are light and bright, and colors dance on the forest floor. Unchanged, yet not the same as it was. With a deep sense of disappointment, Hanna breathes in quickly and turns around, to Steinn. He’s standing there, waiting.

Hrafn pulls his hands as far as he can up into his jacket sleeves. He has broad, meaty hands, like soft paws, which he tries to hide by wearing suits specially tailored for him, with sleeves just long enough to disguise the size of his hands. He is ashamed of them and thinks they bear false witness to years of toil as a workman, a farmer, or a sailor. Hrafn has never lifted his hands in manual labor; he hasn’t tilled the soil, let alone hauled a fish from the sea. The work his fingers recognize is tapping a computer keyboard, and his palm fits comfortably around a mouse. He is proud of never having had to do manual labor, but these hands run in the family, inherited from earlier generations, an inheritance Hrafn has no use for in his line of work.

He is sitting in an avant-garde conference hall in a new building in Moscow. The seats are wine red, wide, and plush, the color faintly reminiscent of old political leanings. The hall is crowded, primarily with men in suits of varying shades of gray. Hrafn has his computer open on the swivel table attached
to his seat, reading the business pages of the English newspapers while the words of the Icelandic minister go in one ear and out the other.

“As the minister for fisheries and agriculture it is a great pleasure for me to address this international business conference here in Moscow,” announces the minister. “For many decades, Russia and Iceland have enjoyed good business relations,” he continues. “In previous years, these relations were largely confined to fish processing, the sale of herring, fishing tackle, and equipment, but nowadays we have business deals springing up in many spheres. Today we not only have representatives of the Icelandic fishing industry, but also stakeholders of large telecommunications and pharmaceutical corporations. We have representatives from Icelandic banks and, last but not least, up-and-coming young musicians and artists.”

The fisheries minister glances over the crowded hall, his eyes flitting from one delegate to another; they rest briefly on Hrafn before he returns to his speech. “Icelandic fisheries are different from those of other countries,” he says proudly. “Different in the sense that they do not enjoy public funding. They are privately run.”

And so his speech goes on. Hrafn looks around the hall. He knows some of the Icelanders here; he has personal connections with the Icelandic visual arts and regularly attends arts events in Reykjavik, so he recognizes many faces among the artists. Hrafn is an only child who inherited a collection of paintings from his father, Arni, who was a shipowner, passionately patriotic, with a heart of gold and a fondness for drink. Arni was a hands-on man; he knew all his employees and their families personally and could address their children by name.
It annoyed Hrafn to listen to his father singing the praises of his workers and his country, singing patriotic songs in a haze of bluish smoke with his London Docks cigar in one hand and a glass of cognac in the other, sitting under a painting by Gunnlaugur Scheving of sailors battling a storm. He felt his father’s attitude belonged to a bygone age.

Arni was a generous man who loved the arts and knew how to enjoy the good things of life, but in his later years, his business went into decline and he lacked the drive to expand or to update his assets. He didn’t keep abreast of developments in his field; he just stuck with tried-and-trusted methods. After his death, Hrafn totally turned the business around, got it back up again, and tripled its turnover.

The paintings Arni had collected were a haphazard selection of works by amateurs and professional artists—pictures of the harbor, townscapes of Reykjavik, landscapes, and sentimental paintings of sunsets. Arni bought paintings from most of the people who knocked on his door. In his eyes, artists’ contributions formed an important part of the nation’s self-image. These men stood side by side with Arni in the struggle to achieve a decent life for an independent nation. Men, for there were no women who knocked on Arni’s door; he was not that progressive.

After his father’s death, Hrafn had experts value the collection; he got rid of the sunsets but held on to the cultural heritage. In his eyes, the paintings are a financial investment. Hrafn is not given to patriotic feelings. He knows his art collection inside out; he has made it his business to know the life’s work of the most highly respected painters and the price their works will fetch. He knows which periods are the most sought
after, where the missing links in the chain are, and where the market has been saturated. Hrafn rates his paintings according to their value; the most valuable ones are in storage. He collects works almost exclusively by deceased artists.

Hrafn feels his phone vibrate in his breast pocket. He recognizes the number. He has been in discussion with Kristin, the director of the Reykjavik gallery, recently. She is constantly networking in the private sector for financial support, both for one-off exhibitions and ongoing projects, and one of her pet projects is to get rid of the entrance fee. So far he has avoided committing himself, but now he needs to make a decision, either to refuse or agree to support her project, but he still has not made up his mind. He doesn’t pick up. The gallery is not his priority, and Kristin will have to wait for the moment; he will talk to her later. Hrafn is keen to support the gallery financially, but he is not sure he wants to fork out the sum she’s after and not get anything tangible in return.

Hrafn views paintings through the eye of common sense and not from the heart as his father did. He is not at all interested in the artists here at the conference, paid for by the state with the aim of enhancing his country’s image abroad and showing that Iceland is a player on the international stage. He has no interest in art. Modern art is meaningless to him; he doesn’t understand it and doesn’t see what drives these artists.

Having looked over the stock market situation, Hrafn subtly tilts his computer screen toward him and opens up the web page of a Copenhagen auction house. Dealing in paintings is his private business. Hrafn keeps a regular eye on the web pages of auction houses in London and Copenhagen, and he
wants to see which paintings have come up for auction since the previous evening.

He spots Vasiliy Ivanov Gubin’s balding head two rows in front; Vasya, his father’s old business colleague. His father, Arni, and Vasya were best friends, and Hrafn rarely feels as close to his father as when he meets Vasya, who is like a kindly uncle to him. Vasya reminds him of his father’s good points: courtesy, hospitality, friendship, and compassion for his fellow men. On the other side of the hall he spots Stanislav Petrov’s rosy, youthful face—his contact in the pharmaceutical company, whom he wants to clinch a deal with during this trip. Hrafn wants more shares and he needs Stanislav’s support.