The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (21 page)

Marty notices that her cheeks have flushed.

“So, then, over in Antwerp, Bartholomeus Grondonck is painting his only signed work, dated 1617.”

Marty stares at
The Kermesse of Oudernarde
. It depicts peasants and children frolicking in a village during a festival. The light is blue-green and spectral.

“This is quintessentially Flemish,” Ellie says. She puts one hand on her hip. “Look at the guy pissing against the doorpost.”

This comment catches Marty off guard and he folds his arms in delight, leaning back to better take her in.

“Classic Brueghelian narrative, the innocence of children juxtaposed with the excess and debauchery of their parents. Now,” she says, moving along, “we see this elegant and lush river landscape by Anton Mirou, also Flemish, not wonderful, but still interesting, and finally this divine de Momper, with his winter landscape. You can feel the bracing cold in this one. See how the horseman's mantle covers everything but his eyes and nose, making him look a little like a hangman. But there's not much wind and some pallid-looking sunshine is straining through the clouds. See the tree encrusted with frost, glimmering with ice—that's just beautiful!”

They both stand for a moment studying the tiny pendants of ice on the tree. There's a look of quiet reverie on her face.

He asks, “Are you religious, Ellie?”

She gives him a quizzical look. “Agnostic at best. Why do you ask?”

“Most people in the art world are looking for something divine in old paintings. Atheists looking for meaning and so on. When you look at these paintings there's a look of devotion on your face.”

She shakes her head. “I'm terribly shortsighted. I'm sure that's it. I've been accused of daydreaming my whole life, but it's really just myopia.”

He takes a step back so he can see all four paintings at once. “So which one do you think I should bid on?”

She brings her jeweler's loupe up to one eye and hunches over the de Momper, studying the brushwork and humming. She straightens and says, “If it were me, and I had the means, I'd take them all. The real value is in the collection, the fact that a single moment of the seventeenth century is chronicled, from that beautiful golden parrot tulip painted in Middleburg to this Flemish peasant frolic.”

Marty looks down at the catalogue and takes a quick mental tally. The estimated price for all four is a little north of eighty thousand dollars. He swallows, flips pages, imagines briefly that Ellie knows exactly who he is and this is his punishment for trying to flush her out.

Regaining composure, he looks up and says, “What ties them together, besides history and geography?”

“For one thing, oil on copper. They're all on the same metal support. Whoever Mr. J. A. Simmons was, he didn't want his paintings to age. Apart from a few tiny dents, the paint is pristine with virtually no cracking. Good as new. Look at those jewel-like finishes, the bright pigments…”

“I noticed the craquelure is nonexistent,” he says, then wonders if he sounds pompous.

“Metals don't react to humidity changes the way canvas or wood does.”

From behind, they hear a commotion and turn to see the auctioneer making a sound check at the dark wood rostrum. A few men in overalls are rearranging chairs to make more room. A solid crowd has gathered in the foyer and gallery area and Marty suspects it will be standing room only.

“We better get in position,” he says. “The socialites like to sit up front so they can be seen.”

They take their seats a few rows from the front and watch as the auctioneer—a middle-aged man in a bespoke suit—continues counting into the microphone. Every once in a while he hoods his gaze beneath the lights and checks in with someone at the back of the room.

Marty says, “Notice the accent. The auction houses all hire Brits or Swiss or Belgians to flog off their art. It distracts you from the fact that this is not that different from a horse auction. I have a friend who's the auctioneer for Sotheby's and he tells me the house hires a voice coach who studies his performances. He's trained to avoid verbal tics and colloquialisms. Elocution and strong body language sell paintings, apparently.”

“I had no idea,” Ellie says.

Marty turns around to assess the crowd, hoping he won't see anybody he knows.

She says, “I've read that brown paintings don't sell as well as brighter colors. Is there any way that could be true?”

“Absolutely. And buxom female nudes sell better than skinny ones or males. Which seems intuitive enough. Also, size matters. If you can't fit it into an uptown elevator then it adds a layer of complication.”

A few minutes later the salesroom is packed and there's a small crowd standing at the back. The lights dim in the house and come up on the rostrum. The auctioneer strides onto the little stage with his folio notebook. He takes a moment to make eye contact with the audience and smile. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's sale of Old Masters. Before we begin, I'm obliged to read the rules concerning the conditions of sale.” In a clipped Oxbridge accent, he recounts the return policy, the waivers and disclaimers, the commission fees. Marty notices that Ellie writes some of these down on the back of an envelope. A few of the auction house staff stand off to the side, sizing up the crowd.

Marty leans close to Ellie, close enough to notice that she smells more like acetone than perfume. “He's standing up there with a seating chart in his book. It's a map of the money. The people who RSVP get special placement so he knows where his bids are likely to come from. The rest of us walk-ins are harder to estimate…”

The auctioneer raises his gavel and turns it gently in his hand. “Let's begin with lot one, shall we, the Jacques de l'Ange on my right.” A colored slide of the painting appears on a screen behind him. Marty flips through his catalogue to see that it's titled
An Allegory of Avarice
. It seems like a ruefully appropriate place for the auction to begin.

“In this case six thousand starting…”

A paddle in the front row wafts the air. “We have six thousand. Now six five. Do I see seven thousand dollars?”

Marty says, “Sometimes he starts with what they call chandelier bids. He calls out a series of bids that haven't actually come from the salesroom.”

When she doesn't respond, Marty looks over at Ellie. She bites her bottom lip, spellbound; she could be watching a boxing match with that look of bloodlust. The bidding continues through Italy and back to the lowlands of the seventeenth century, the swamps and fens and backwaters that were somehow a hothouse for the flourishing of painterly technique, the whole Golden Age a fluke of rheumatic temperament and history. Marty punctuates the litany of artist names with this whispered commentary. He tells her to watch the range of bidding gestures, the finger salutes and paddle swipes, the big hand waves and curt head nods. She turns in her seat to better take in the spectacle.

When the first oil on copper goes up, Ellie looks outraged that they're being sold off separately. On the back of her catalogue she writes,
These paintings shouldn't be orphaned
. Apparently, Marty and Ellie are not the only ones who've scoped out the handpicked private collection, the brilliant depictions on four-hundred-year-old copper. Bids come from all sides in a flurry. Marty generally likes to take the temperature of the room before he makes a bid, so the auctioneer is saying
going once
on the Van den Berghe when he throws up his hand. Ellie's leg twitches as she tries to restrain herself. They're starting with the most valuable of the four paintings, the floral still life that could have been painted last week for all its color saturation. It's at thirty-six thousand dollars and Marty doesn't quite know how he's waded into these waters. The painting is beautiful in its own way, but he's not feeling the libidinal pull that usually guides him at auction. The artwork is merely a vehicle to further entrapment of those who wronged him. He stares straight up at the rostrum but scans his peripheral vision for competing bids. Someone from up the back must wink or pull an earlobe, because a staff member signals to the auctioneer from the sidelines. Ellie looks over at him, her eyes widened back. Marty leans close and says, “You're terrible at this,” and then throws up his hand again without turning away from her. She closes her hands into fists.

“I see thirty-seven thousand from the gentleman at center. In the rear? Fair warning. Going once … Twice. Sold.”

Ellie rubs the palms of her hands down her skirt front, looking down at the floor with a colossal grin.

“On my right now we have Grondonck and in this case, the bidding starts at twelve thousand. Again I see the gentleman at center, this time taking the lead. Now I'm looking for twelve thousand five hundred.”

Marty whispers to Ellie: “Why don't you take over the bidding? Every time I tap my watchband you throw up your wooden paddle.”

“No, I couldn't,” she says.

A bid comes from the far right, a bat of the paddle from a ferocious-looking woman in a cashmere scarf. Marty taps his watchband on
going once
and there's a hesitation, a moment where Ellie seems paralyzed by some sense of etiquette or professional boundary. Marty shrugs with his hands in his lap and then her paddle shoots into the air. The auctioneer says, “And now a bid with gusto from the duo at center, excellent, and we're at thirteen thousand five hundred.” Marty looks over at Ellie, but her eyes are still down at the floor. She rubs her hands along her skirt front again and when she turns them over he sees that her palms are glistening with sweat. He feels an odd mix of tenderness and satisfaction. There's a mounting affection toward her but also this grim delight in seeing her out of her element, in lifting that crown of tangled hair from the photograph and giving her cause to put on heels and show her face. It's clear to him now that she was not the calculating mind behind the forgery swap. No, she was the subject matter expert, the hired brush, the art savant who's probably never eaten an oyster or gone to a jazz club. It strikes him that he wants to teach her things and dupe her at exactly the same time. The feeling puzzles him as he sits back, the wire transfer to the auction house already made in his mind. The whole thing has already played out. The next oil on copper displays on the screen and he leans close to Ellie's ear. “Look at those poor sods tramping through the snow. Let's reunite them with their siblings.” She looks up from the floor and gives him a look of sincere elation.

 

Leaving Amsterdam

SPRING 1637

The creditor, an aging bachelor named Cornelis Groen, had commissioned Barent for a series of landscapes that were never completed. Now he's offered Sara a year of employment to work off the debt. Through the open doorway of her house, Sara can see Mr. van Schooten, the creditor's manservant, in the waiting gig, the paintings he bought at the auction wrapped and sitting at his feet. She walks out into the street and pulls the door behind her. As it catches, she stands for a moment on the stoop, unable to turn around, both hands on the green waxed door, palms flat, as if feeling the warmth of a kettle. She's suddenly terrified that she won't remember what Kathrijn looked like without the envelope of the house, without the earthly reminders of a life briefly spent. Giving herself a gentle push back, she turns to face the street. Her neighbors, many of them artists, have come out to wave goodbye.

They catch a late-afternoon water coach along the tow-canal that connects Amsterdam to Haarlem. From there, a boat takes them down the Spaarne to Heemstede, a district of burgher estates and wooded dunes. Sara looks off at the passing fields. Sometimes, when she went sketching in the countryside with Barent and Kathrijn, they would see a tiny village in this region where dogs towed flat-bottomed boats or peasants rowed out to the fields to milk their cows. Barent would tell Kathrijn stories of childhood travels with his father, a brewer stricken by wanderlust—tales of Drenthe woodcutters living in houses that were windowless and half underground, or the fishermen of Marken who lived on pilings and tarred their wooden houses against the constant damp. He'd seen heaths and forests, could describe the way the provinces were walled in by the sea on one side and the sandy moors and marshlands on the other. She pictures him out among it now, free to roam while she lives out his punishment.

After nightfall, the boat pilot leaves them at the dock in Heemstede with their stock of paintings. They wait for an hour in the cold fog. Sara glimpses a few houses through a lacework of tree branches, a stray candle burning behind a window that projects a faint halo through the mist. Eventually, a carriage rocks down the sandy road toward the dock. A single lantern bounces and sways next to the driver, a man in his thirties. Sara is not introduced to the driver, but she hears Van Schooten call him Tomas and she thanks him by name when he helps her up into the carriage. He gives her an appreciative nod, then climbs up onto the box seat. They ride a few miles along the narrow track, the fog clearing away from the river, before wending through a wood of elms and birches. They enter the estate through an iron gate. The lantern swags little glimpses into view, picks out a stone fountain and a bower in one of the gardens along the path. Beyond the dome of pale light the heavy facade and tall white windows of the house come into view. The steep tiled roof is run through with dormer windows that jut out like tiny caves in a cliffside.

The front door is carved from a solid piece of oak and bears the name
Groen
above a coat of arms—an eagle reared up and holding a sword in its talons. They pass into the foyer and Van Schooten sets the paintings against the wall. “Mr. Groen won't be disturbed tonight, but he will meet with you at breakfast. I have a small cottage at the back of the estate, but the others sleep up in the attic rooms. Mr. Brouwer here will show you up. Good night.” His epic errand dispensed with, Van Schooten is out the door and she hears his boots along the gravel drive. Tomas Brouwer holds the lantern, his expression blank, before he reaches for her bundle of clothes and the painting box. Reflexively, she picks them up herself, unwilling to be parted from them. In a gentle voice, he says, “I have to take the horses to the stable, but I'll take you up first.”