The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (16 page)

“I have to say, you're not the usual sort of courier we see around here. It was very generous of you to bring the painting all this way,” says Max.

“At my age you want to stretch your legs every chance you get. It also takes an hour to put your shoes on.”

The director chuckles. They sip their coffees.

“My colleagues at the Met tell me that you're like part of the family.”

“Call it a long courtship. They've been after my collection since the sixties and they've worked out that I'm a childless widower. I guess the odds are in their favor.”

The director leans back in his leather chair to absorb the curt humor. He looks like he's taking Marty in by degrees, like a difficult painting from across the room. “I can't tell you how excited we are to have your de Vos on loan. It means a lot to us. I hope the painting traveled well.”

Marty watches as the director allows himself a glance at the wrapped painting for the first time.

“I was hoping to meet with the curator and hand her the painting personally.”

“Like much of the artwork, I'm afraid she's also on loan to us. Eleanor teaches at Sydney University and comes to the gallery a few times a week. She's been burning the midnight oil of late. We have some last-minute repairs being done to the exhibition space.”

“When do you open?”

“Next week. You're just in the nick of time, actually. We'd almost given up.”

“Sorry for the alarm.”

“Not at all,” says Max, smiling.

Marty places a hand on top of the painting. He sees the raised veins and the liver spots like small brown planets; he has no idea who this hand might belong to.

“Will you be in town for long?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Well, we'd love for you to stay for the opening. You'd be a guest of honor. And we can show you the sights while you're here. Would you like one of the curators to give you a tour of the museum?”

“Yes, I'd like that.” Marty thinks it poor form that Max is deputizing a curator for the tour. Another varnished layer of respect peels away. His hand is still on the painting and he's curious how Max will raise the issue of the actual handoff. He waits and sips his coffee.

“As it turns out, we've had a couple other de Voses come from the Netherlands and we were wondering if you'd allow us to do some testing on your painting. We have a few days before we can hang everything, so all the loan paintings are in storage.”

“Testing?”

“It's a rare chance to have a handful of de Vos paintings in the same room. We have a scientist on staff who does magic with X-rays and infrared images. She can practically tell you what the painter had for breakfast on the day of the final brushstroke. I can assure you that not a thread of the canvas will be harmed. Everything is covered in the insurance forms.”

Marty sees Max's shoes wagging under the table and he drains his coffee cup. It burns the roof of his mouth a little, but then there's a wonderful burst of caffeine, like warm water being poured over his scalp. “I would need to see the paperwork. This painting has been in my family since before Isaac Newton was born.”

The specificity of the historical reference seems to take the wind out of Max Culkins's sails. He whistles silently and shakes his head. “A miracle, really.” Then he gathers himself up again. “Right, of course, please take your time with all the paperwork. Consult your lawyers as you see fit. I'll have the head conservator come up and go over everything.” Max forms a church steeple with his fingers and bites his lower lip. “I don't suppose I could grab a quick peek?”

Marty gets to his feet and sets his coffee cup on the edge of the desk. He picks up the painting and follows Max to a corner of the room where a reading table is laid out with antique maps covered in vellum. He sets the painting down and Max produces a letter opener, a tiny sword with a silver-plated handle. Marty takes it from him and cuts through the twine. He pulls back a flap of the thick blanket to reveal a bed of green felt.

“Is that billiard cloth?” Max asks.

“Good eye. I had to get the baize on mine replaced so I kept the old one for just such an occasion.”

“Genius idea.”

Marty pulls back the green felt and exposes the face of the painting to the room. She's in perfect condition, he thinks. Kept in a narrow temperature range except for the taxi rides to and from airports. Max sidles up in his French cuffs, the kind of shirts Marty used to wear as a law partner. He looks for something in the director's face, some recognition of history and the fluke of an old man bundling across the globe to bring him this gift. I would have liked you better if you drank your coffee black and offered me a tour, if you'd led me around the galleries in your dandy purple socks. But what Marty sees in Max's face is something else—a quiet look of consternation. “There it is,” Max says, “there it is.”

 

Manhattan

SEPTEMBER 1958

Red Hammond is on the other end of the telephone, filing what he calls “a dispatch from the field.” He's sent Marty an envelope containing a business card and a grainy photo of a woman hunched over a kitchen table. Marty turns the card over between his fingers.
Eleanor Shipley, Art Restoration
. It's a tasteful beige cardstock with discreet lettering and a slanting phone number. It's a business card that promises artful restraint.

Red says, “From all accounts, she's a woman.”

“I can see that. What did you find out about her?”

But Red is not quite ready to talk about the upshot. Instead, he wants to talk about his week of surveillance in Brooklyn as if he's just returned from the jungles of Malaysia. “I have no idea what people eat over there. I was starving, could never find a decent bagel. And no one seems to have heard of parallel parking in that particular borough. I circled her apartment for hours sometimes because some jerk refused to park against the curb. Or because people live in such small apartments that they store their clothes in their automobiles. We're talking about parked closets, stationary clothes hampers, not modes of transportation. I'm telling you that Brooklyn makes Edgewater, New Jersey, look civilized.”

“What else?”

“I paid some bum to watch my car while I followed her into the city, up into the hundreds at Columbia, over to the little framing shop, then a few meetings with clients in coffee shops and ethnic restaurants.”

“What kind of clients?”

“From the general auditory clues of conversation, these seemed to be legitimate restoration deals. She has this nifty little portfolio of the paintings she's restored in a binder. I like binders. You know the kind with plastic sleeves?”

“Yes, I know them. So you have no hard proof?”

“Not currently. But I watched her paint in her kitchen through the zoom lens of my Pentax. She gets up before it's light and paints in a man's shirt. I even walked onto the Gowanus Expressway, risking personal injury and a citation, so I could peer into her squalid little apartment at eye level. They should call these apartments furnished kitchenettes if you ask my opinion. You can cook while sitting on the edge of your Murphy bed. Who was Murphy, anyhow, and why the hell does he get a bed named after him?”

Marty studies the photograph of the woman standing framed behind a window. She is slender and pale, with unbrushed honey-blond hair that reaches her shoulders. Her eyes are downcast, a paintbrush in one hand. She's wearing a powder-blue oxford, open to the third button, her collarbone and neck exposed in the early light. The angle of her head conceals her face—the camera registers her forehead and a crown of unruly hair. There's something hapless and slovenly about her appearance that doesn't gel with Marty's sense of a successful art forger. The calculation, the precise mixing of pigments, the requisite nerve and pluck—these are all missing from the scene. This looks like a woman in her midtwenties who has trouble remembering to bathe. He tells Red that he'll send the final retainer payment and that he should await further instructions.

Red says, “One more thing.”

“What's that?”

“I could hear that she's got an accent of some kind, though I'm not prepared to narrow it down beyond South African, British, or Australian. Boston is also not out of the equation.”

“You're a real linguist, Red,” Marty says. “I'll be in touch.”

He hangs up the phone and looks out his window. The new office has a view that faces south, across the skyline of Midtown. On a clear day, he has a straight shot at the Empire State Building. It's late afternoon and he can see the light glinting off the limestone and granite, the way it flares when it catches on the vertical strips of stainless steel. He thinks of cliff faces and Mohawk Indians, all those Quebecois ironworkers who came down to build the city its icon. His little reverie is interrupted when Gretchen buzzes in with a reminder about his final meeting of the day.

*   *   *

After work, Marty walks eight blocks to the athletic club where he plays squash once a week. Because the game is mocked among his racquetball-playing colleagues, he's had to look outside the firm to find fellow enthusiasts. Marty got the game from a British expat uncle and the other men inherited the sport by similar means—athletic European fathers and zealous Anglophiles with resting heart rates in the low fifties. Like his ham radio buddies, most of whom he's never met in person, these men tend to rub against the grain of convention. They drive difficult imported cars with tight gearboxes, smoke Dunhill cigarettes that one of them brings back duty-free from Paris twice a year, and carry allegiances to outspoken ideas. Marty knows he should be driving a Ford and drinking American beer, but instead he drinks Irish porters and stouts and drives a Citroën DS-19 that spends half its life with the mechanic. Because he didn't fight in Korea or World War II, these frivolous, unpatriotic habits sometimes weigh on him.

There are four of them in the core group and they play a round robin each week to determine the overall winner. Invariably, Frederic Kriel, a Swiss-German auctioneer who's the sales director of European art for Sotheby's, trounces them all. He's tall and leonine, impeccably dressed in handmade shirts, and arrives each week in the locker room wearing kidskin driving moccasins. Marty unabashedly copies his clothes and accessories—Frederic is a barometer of elegant, masculine style. Out on the court, he unleashes a savage serve, an uncanny straight drive into the back corners, and a legendary kill shot they call the Luftwaffe. When Marty loses to Kriel by five or six points he likes to say that he's been
Luftwaffered
or
Himmlered
. Frederic is a gracious winner and takes these jibes well. He's the right amount of Swiss and German, Marty thinks, so as not to evoke a crushing defeat at the hands of an Aryan prince of the Third Reich. His eyes are a cold alpine blue, flecked with mica, and they put Marty in mind of the ice at the bottom of a Scotch glass.

The other two players are Will Turner, a surgeon, and Boyd Curry, a copywriter for a Madison Avenue ad agency. For months, Marty has been telling them of the unfolding story around the forgery and they have listened attentively and offered counsel. The group likes to ponder difficult problems, from national security to whether or not Ezra Pound should have been released from the nuthouse to the potential indiscretions that come with attending out-of-town conferences. They pride themselves on giving thoughtful advice. Because they all share a love of a marginalized sport, they often favor offbeat solutions over conventional wisdom.

Tonight, after Frederic has demoralized them all, they sit in the club lounge with imported beers in green bottles and a bowl of Spanish almonds. Except for Frederic, who's unmarried, they're supposed to be going home for dinner, to their respective wives, but they're flirting with the menu and the waitress. “A Bryn Mawr graduate with a ponytail” keeps making forays to entice them to the full dinner menu, but so far they have stuck to their guns. Unlike the basement level, where the neglected squash courts resemble concrete bunkers with flaking white paint, the club lounge is rarefied with mahogany and dead member portraits and plush leather booths. Presidents have dined here and swum in the pool with its skylight and tessellated tiles. Marty wants to ask for advice about what to do with the latest information, with the name Eleanor Shipley, but he can't find a way into the conversation. At the end of the second beer, Boyd has floated a question about professional anxiety dreams. He likes to formalize their conversations, provide a theme or a hypothetical—who would win in a made-up presidential race, which animal, panther or jaguar, would vanquish the other beast in a battle to the death or an open-country sprint? Tonight, he's asked “What's the worst dream you have about work?”

“Recurring?” Will clarifies.

“Could be,” Boyd answers.

Frederic says, “Mine is always the same. I am standing behind the rostrum at Sotheby's and the house is full. A few employees are on the line with London buyers over at the phone bank. The next painting comes out and my vision begins to blur. It's supposed to be seventeenth century, but it looks modern and abstract. I look down at my notebook, which is supposed to contain the names of who's expected to bid and where the money is sitting, but every page is blank. I don't even know what the painting is, so how can I sell it? I just stand there until eventually one of the staffers says that they have a phone call for me. Everyone in the audience puts their paddles down and they watch me as I cross the room and take the phone.”

“Who's calling?” Marty asks.

“It's just breathing on the line, but somehow I know it's the dead artist. He's so saddened by what he's just witnessed.”

They pause a moment, sip their beers empathetically.

Will studies the head of his racquet, adjusting the catgut strings into parallel rows. “I have these little rituals on the day of a big surgery,” he says. “I trim my fingernails and listen to a Verdi opera in my office. Sometimes I read a few pages from
Huck Finn
. Then I go into the OR and greet everyone by name. If I haven't met a nurse I always ask her name and where she went to school. In my dream I am standing next to Harry Truman in scrubs and he's telling me, right as I sew up the patient, that I've left some gauze inside the abdominal cavity. We stand there arguing and eventually I open the patient back up and pull out a little wad of scarlet gauze.”