inventory of Expropriated Property is signed by Miguel Forcade in May of the same year, but there was something that surprised me: they didn’t list any paintings. So I spoke to a girl who works in the Archive, a skinny mulatta, with pert little breasts, and asked her if the document was legal and she said it was. So I explained how important paintings weren’t listed and she told me that came in an appendix, because important paintings were a Patrimony issue. So she helped me look for the appendix and we couldn’t find it anywhere… What do you make of the story so far?”
“That I’ll kill you, if you don’t get to the end quickly… And no more ‘sos’, if you don’t mind.”
“OK, so, with the inventory number she called Patrimony, to see if they had the copy of the other appendix in the archives… You know what they told her?”
“That they didn’t have it either, that it never existed, that they never saw one, that there was no appendix.”
“Elementary, my dear Conde.”
“And if there is no appendix it’s because they never filled one in and just as they sold the Matisse painting to Gomez de la Pena, they sold the rest to other people… It’s called a straight favour on the side.”
“You really think so, Conde?”
“I think that and something else, Manolo: that Miguel Forcade knew more about painting than Gomez de la Pena imagined and if that’s true, the dead man screwed the one living twenty-eight years ago.”
“But how, if he sold him a painting worth almost four million for five hundred pesos?”
“Because he sold him a painting not worth ten for well over five hundred… I bet you anything that no appendix ever existed because all the paintings found in that house were fakes and that’s why Patrimony didn’t want them. Somehow or other the Garcia Abreus got their paintings out of Cuba and left only copies in the house that could deceive any impromptu inspector. But Miguel didn’t swallow that pill; he took advantage of the situation and sold those copies as originals. The most likely scenario is that he quoted a price to the State for a painting he registered as fake, sold like any other object, and pocketed the difference for a painting that was handed over as very valuable, which even came with the certificate of authenticity the Garcia Abreus certainly left behind, but with the proviso it wasn’t shown for some time. Miguel Forcade wasn’t crazy about selling that Matisse on the free market, let alone the Goya and Murillo that everybody knew were in the house. Unless he had a good reason… Do you remember how the young Garcia Abreu was an imitator of famous painters? Well if things are as I think they are, what Gomez de la Pena has in his house is by Garcia Abreu junior and if Gomez de la Pena found out, I don’t doubt he’d cut off all Miguel Forcade had dangling. Go on, eat the other trayful, we’re leaving in half an hour…”
Manolo’s eyes, momentarily squinting with admiration, followed his boss as he left.
“Hey, Conde, how did you figure out all that?”
“Helped by Bacchus, a Padre and the ration book. All for three pesos,” he responded, not mentioning how the cleansing of his rage at the memory of ex-lieutenant Fabricio had also played its part.
He didn’t even look at the lifts but climbed the stairs after a telephone in the hope of finding his old friend Juan Emilio Friguens at the radio station: they’d go together and check out the sick joke about the yellow dog Garcia Abreu junior stole from Henri Matisse.
Clad in the pyjamas of his relaxed life-sentence, Gerardo Gomez de la Pena smiled at his new crop of visitors. His hairstyle that afternoon appeared a little less than perfect – short on Vaseline, thought the Count – but his self- confidence remained intact, even riding high, when the lieutenant explained the reason for his visit: “It’s just that we would like our friend Friguens, who is an art critic, to take a look at your Matisse.”
The former potentate’s smile broadened.
“That painting set you thinking, didn’t it, Lieutenant?”
“A Matisse is a Matisse…”
“And even more so in Havana,” Gomez de la Pena added suggestively, as he invited them into his living room, where he spoke to Friguens. “It’s right there.”
The Count saw Juan Emilio’s meagre body shake all over: three yards from Matisse’s final offering to impressionism and Cezanne’s mastery, the old journalist kept a respectful silence, tongue-tied perhaps by the wonder of seeing before him, after several decades, the masterpiece he had thought lost for ever. When he’d asked him to accompany him to see Gomez de la Pena’s picture, the Count hadn’t mentioned his suspicions and anxiously awaited the specialist’s final verdict: let it be fake, he prayed mentally, so he would have a motive to find Gomez de la Pena guilty or, at least, to see his cockiness diminished by a twenty-eight year-old fraud…
“Please be seated,” said their host, and the policemen obeyed.
Meanwhile, old Friguens took two steps towards the canvas, like a prowling tiger closing in on its prey. He didn’t speak, almost didn’t breathe, when he took a third step, and reduced to inches the distance between him and the Matisse.
“Have you got anywhere with Miguel’s death?” asked Gomez, unimpressed by Friguens’s wonderment, as if he were used to that kind of spectacle.
“Maybe,” replied the Count, keeping his eyes on Friguens.
“It’s hot, isn’t it?” interjected the former minister, refusing to accept the silence.
“It’s the calm before the hurricane,” nodded the Count.
“Yes, that must be it.”
“That’s it,” he said, when Friguens took another step nearer, as if he wanted to walk down the street on the canvas and enjoy the breeze rustling the trees in that French village.
The Count’s interest forced Gomez de la Pena to look at the painting, into which that emaciated old man was now sinking his face, as if about to swallow it whole.
“What do you think, maestro?” came the sarcastic question from the Matisse’s accidental owner, and Friguens turned round.
“And have you got the certificates of authenticity?” asked the critic, coughing a couple of times, hiding his mouth behind the hand that formed a closed umbrella.
“And endorsements from Paris and New York.”
“Could I see them?”
“Naturally,” agreed Gomez de la Pena, standing up, after putting his misshapen toes in his slippers.
When the men left the room, the Count lit a cigarette, wishing to defer the moment before he put his question.
“Well, what do you reckon, Juan Emilio?”
The old critic looked at the Matisse again, as he moved away and settled into one of the willow armchairs.
“Let me sit down. It’s incredible…”
“And what do you mean by that?”
“Precisely that: that it is incredible,” Friguens reaffirmed. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but I think I found out why the Garcia Abreus bought the Matisse secretly. The problem was that in 1952 Fernando Garcia Abreu got into a bank fraud up to his neck, and got out unscathed because of his friendship with President Batista. That’s was why he didn’t want it to be known he’d bought such an expensive picture, you see.” He trailed off as Gomez de la Pena came back, extracting papers from a brown envelope.
“Here they are,” he said, handing Friguens a few attached sheets of paper.
Juan Emilio lifted the certificates up to his eyes, and read them a smile briefly hovering on his lips, until he said: “Now this really is incredible,” as if his flowery vocabulary had been dried up by the aesthetic impact of the Matisse.
“What is incredible?” queried Gomez de la Pena, smiling more confidently.
“The fact that the certificates are genuine but the painting is more fake than a twenty peso bill bearing the Count’s face. Now what could be more incredible than that?”
In the sparse space of that tiny office on the third floor of Police Headquarters, far from the futurist flourishes of the house he’d assigned himself, Gerardo Gomez de la Pena, in ordinary shoes, incapable of inspiring envy in anyone, seemed a man who had aged instantaneously. In fact, the process began the moment Juan Emilio Friguens made the credible incredible, declaring with a triumphant smile that it was a fake Matisse painted in Havana, many years after the French original had been created. The absence of the yellow dog was the most obvious hint from the forger, who’d left other mischievous traces of his labours as a copier, so many crumbs thrown to whoever wanted
