Cold Hit

“And you, what were you doing?”

“I stood behind him to watch, to be there to assist him should he have needed me to.”

“And Deni?”

“Practically breathing down his neck. Not that he minded that, from her.”

“How long does this take, what he was doing?”

“Depends. On what’s there, how many layers, how easily- or not-it picks up. I would say Marco worked for close to an hour before he said very much. He stopped to tell us that he thought he had gotten through the primary layer. He stood up to stretch, and to have me take a look, which I did.”

“What did you see?”

Cannon smiled for the first time in ten minutes. “You sound just as anxious as Denise. ‘What do you see, Marco? What can you tell me?’ He poured himself another glass and asked me a few questions, ignoring Deni completely.

“ ‘What century, boy, do you see now? What school, what artist?’ He did that with me all the time, delighting in those rare occasions when I could pinpoint a good answer as rapidly as he was able to do.”

“Did you recognize anything?”

“Only that Marco had gone back several centuries, between removing the new paint and the grime that had so discolored the original canvas. Wherever this piece had come from, it had been terribly, terribly neglected.”

“What then?”

“He went back to work, this time adding some ammonia to the acetone and patiently dabbing away. It’s a very slow business. After a while, Marco’s touch exposed some bright blue paint trimmed with a very pearly sort of highlight. He almost gasped when he saw the contrast of the two colors next to each other.”

“Excuse my ignorance,” Mike said, “but why?”

“I didn’t know myself, but now I assume that was the point at which he thought he had recognized the artist, perhaps even the painting.”

“And Deni?”

“She had seen him do this enough times to know he was reacting to something serious.” Again, Cannon slipped into one of his imitations. “ ‘Go in deeper, Marco,’ she urged him. I remember that he hesitated for a bit, then picked up one of his pointed tools, almost like a scalpel, and began to dig at the thick varnish in another part of the painting. More of the picture came into view, near its center, revealing a clear yellow tint that had been almost brown in color in the layer above.

“That’s when I was banished.”

“By Denise Caxton?”

“By Marco Varelli. That familiar little gesture I told you about earlier, sweeping me away with his hand like you might do to a pet dog you wanted to get out from underfoot? That’s exactly what I got from him. ‘That’s all I’m going to do for today,’ he told me. ‘You may go home now.’ ”

“And did you?”

“I left the studio, certainly. But my curiosity had been aroused. I went straight to the library at NYU to do a bit of art research. At that point I was fairly confident that we had been looking at something from the seventeenth century, probably Dutch.”

“A Rembrandt?” Mike asked.

“Not bad, Detective. It was an interior scene by a great colorist. I was guessing Vermeer, who was known for his pearlcolored reflections and the fantastically luminous shades of blue and yellow. I pored over textbooks until I found what I was looking for. Have you ever heard of a painting called The Concert?”

Neither one of us had.

“You know about the break-in at the Gardner Museum?”

Mike was following the story intently. “Yeah, we do. Why?”

“Along with the great Rembrandt that was taken,” Cannon said, acknowledging Chapman as he went on, “which you clearly seem to be aware of, there was one Vermeer stolen that has never been found either. It’s called The Concert, and it depicts a young woman playing a pianoforte for two others. I believe I’m one of the very few people in the world who has seen that painting-at least, any portion of it-in the last ten years. The other two who saw it with me that day-Mrs. Caxton and Mr. Varelli-are dead. Maybe now you can understand why I’m reluctant to speak about it.”

Mike had no sympathy for Cannon’s fear. “What’s its value?”

“Not as great as the Rembrandt, but still in the multimillions. Vermeer is known to have painted only thirty-five works in his lifetime.”

“Was it still at Varelli’s studio when you got there the next day?”

“No. I never saw it again. Nor did he mention it to me. We went right back to work on the portrait we had been commissioned to restore for the Tate, the one we were immersed in before Denise Caxton asked to drop by. I came in that next morning eager to hear what he and Mrs. Caxton had found after he had dismissed me. Not a word. But then, the texts I had consulted were written before the Gardner theft, so I had no idea the Vermeer had been stolen. I thought that perhaps the museum was deaccessioning the painting, and it made sense to me that the Caxtons were among the few collectors with the means to acquire it-legitimately.

“It wasn’t unusual for Marco to work in silence. Finally, when we broke for lunch, I thought I’d impress him with my knowledge. I’d be the perfect pupil and answer the questions he had asked me when he had started to uncover the picture in my presence.”

“Did it work?”

“It backfired colossally. Marco almost took my head off. I told him that not only did I think I knew the century and the school to which the painting could be attributed, but that I also knew the artist and the work itself. He looked surprised and challenged me.” Cannon looked up at us rather sheepishly. “When I said the words aloud, he became furious at me.

“‘But why?’ I asked him. ‘Why are you so angry?’ ‘You have never, never seen that Vermeer, do you understand, my boy? It has never been in the studio of Marco Varelli.’ He went on to rant and rave about the fact that Denise had brought him a fraud, some lousy copyist’s effort to re- create a Dutch domestic scene, that Denise was a rank amateur who had occasionally been lucky but had made a bad guess. He practically made me swear that the event I witnessed had never taken place.”

“Have you ever told anyone about it?”

“My girlfriend, sure. No one else. I had gone right back to the library and searched the periodicals. That’s when I realized that it must have been the stolen Vermeer, and that Varelli wanted no part of it. I respected him for that, and thought that would be the end of it.”

“You mean it wasn’t? Did Deni come back?”

“Of course she did. Several times, not too long after, just trying to regain favor, I guess. Lots of good wine, charming coquettishness, gifts. Marco wasn’t at all materialistic, but she’d find wonderfully whimsical things-small sculptures, paintings, objets d’art that he couldn’t resist-and bring them by to appease him.”

“Any talk of the Vermeer?”

“None. And again Marco wanted me around when she showed up and made a fuss over him. So they weren’t alone very much those next few visits. Then,” Cannon said, rubbing his eyes with his hand, “there was another tempest. Perhaps, if I hadn’t been such a coward, I’d have done something about it at the time. Deni came in one day very excited, very flustered.”

“When was this, do you remember?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“Months later, Don?”

“No, no. Three or four weeks at most. But I’m pretty sure she had been away, out of the country, in the meantime. I think it was shortly after she and her husband had some kind of huge fight and split up. Anyway, I knew immediately that something different was going on.”

“How?”

“As soon as she arrived, it was Denise who asked me to leave. Even Marco looked puzzled, because she dispensed with the usual flirtation. ‘You don’t mind, do you? I’ve got some personal matters to discuss with Signor Varelli. It’s the middle of the afternoon, Marco-let him have the rest of the day off, okay?’