in Bologna after I got there, to gather material for press releases or to perform whatever other arcane functions Tony was entrusting him with. 'This is more his line, isn't it?'
Not that I had ever been completely clear on what Calvin's line was. But Calvin didn't have friends in Italy who would never trust him again when they learned he'd been passing tidbits of their conversation on to the FBI, or the carabinieri, or wherever they eventually wound up.
'Wouldn't work,' Tony said. He ate economically, the way he did everything—spearing a clam, pulling it from its shell with a deft twist, and neatly flicking it into his mouth. 'Calvin's going to be there only a few days, and his Italian isn't good enough. Besides, you're already involved.'
Chapter 2
I was involved, all right. In fact, as my friend Louis, who happens to be a psychotherapist, informed me afterward, I brought the whole thing on myself in the classic mode of the Nietzschean Tragedy. Except, he said, it was more thriller than tragedy.
I don't know about that. It seems to me I may have forged the way for a new art form: the Nietzschean Farce.
It had started the previous Wednesday at a little after five. The museum had just closed, but I was in my office on the fifth floor, working on the catalogue for a Meissen porcelain exhibition that we would be mounting later in the year. Decorative arts are not exactly in my line, but Tony had found out about a summer internship I'd once put in at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and now I was reaping the benefits. It was tedious work. As a curator, I admire Meissen porcelain enormously; who wouldn't? But looking at a roomful of it makes me glassy-eyed after ten minutes, and writing about it makes me positively catatonic.
'Knock-knock.' Calvin's voice, from the doorway. I looked up. An interruption was not unwelcome.
Calvin Boyer is a small, nimble man in his late twenties with an interesting face; a little plump, a little bug- eyed, and just a little weasely around the mouth and chin. He always puts me in mind of a shifty rabbit, right down to an upper lip that quivers when he gets excited.
He is bright, hard-working, and upbeat, but there is something oily about him, at least to my eyes; a kind of smug cunning. Like Tony, he's a pitchman, but he lacks Tony's formidable credentials as a scholar. Calvin is the only member of the senior staff who is not expert in some aspect of art. His degrees are in journalism and marketing, and when I work with him I sometimes feel as if I'm on the other end of a salesman's spiel.
Nevertheless, I like him too, quite a lot. My friend Louis implies that this indiscriminate liking of people may signal a problem area. He wonders if it represents a displaced hunger for affection resulting from a failure on my mother's part to breast-feed me. This is something we will never know, because I'm too embarrassed to ask my mother whether she breast-fed me or not. When I tell him this, Louis looks at me darkly, shakes his head, and mutters about infantile repression and the anaclitic redefinition of love objects.
Everybody should have a Freudian psychotherapist for a friend. One's life is simplified tremendously.
I like Louis, too, by the way.
'Chris,' Calvin said, 'I just got a call from a guy named Mike Blusher. He imports old paintings from Italy, and he says he's pretty sure he's got a couple of genuine Old Masters that got included in his latest shipment somehow. He doesn't have any idea how they got there. He says he never ordered them. He wants somebody to check them out, and they're in your ball park.'
This was not as exciting as you might think. Museums get agitated calls about Old Masters found in attics or cellars or furniture warehouses, all the time. In my six years as a curator, only one has turned out to be the real thing, and that was when a garbage collector called the museum in San Francisco to say that he'd found a pair of sculptured wooden hands, clasped as if in prayer, in a trash can, and they looked kind of old.
They were: They were from the workshop of Donatello and they had been part of a wooden altar shrine in Fiesole from 1425 to 1944, when they bad been 'liberated' by an overly enthusiastic GI who had whacked them off with a rifle butt. After that, they had remained in a cardboard box in his garage for another forty years, until he threw them out. They are now back in Fiesole; one of my more satisfying coups.
The only one like it in six years. 'Fine,' I said. 'If he wants to bring them in tomorrow after three, I'll have a look.'
'Well, I told him you'd go on out to his warehouse to look at them.'
I laughed. 'Are we making house calls now?'
'Look, you can't blame him for not wanting to drive them around in his car. And the guy's a steady patron of the museum, good for twenty thousand a year. I really think you ought to go. I don't suppose you could do it now?'
'No car,' I said. I was living in an apartment in Winslow, across the Sound. I took the ferry to the city every morning and walked to work.
'I'll drive you. I'll even spring for dinner when we're done. We could be at Mike's warehouse by about 6:10, and I could have you back for the—' He consulted his watch and pressed some tiny buttons on it. '—for the—mm . . .'
When Calvin consults his watch, it is always something of a production. Calvin is the only person I know who actually sends away for those items you see advertised in airline magazines, and that's where his watch came from; a rectangular, sinister, dull-black thing with two faces. A navigator watch, he once explained to me, outfitted with chronograph, dual LCD display, luminous analog dial, and ratcheted safety bezel. Plus more buttons than I have on my stereo system.
'—for the 9:50 ferry!' he said triumphantly. 'How's that?'
I nodded. It sounded better than the Meissen. And I certainly didn't have anything else waiting for me that evening, at my apartment or anywhere else. The fact is, I hadn't made the world's greatest adjustment to bachelorhood after ten years of marriage. I guess I hadn't made the greatest adjustment to marriage either, or I wouldn't be divorced.
I locked up the office and we walked to the covered garage at the Four Seasons, where Calvin insisted on parking his car. The rest of the staff parked in the slots behind the museum. Calvin was the sort of person you'd expect to drive a Porsche, and he did, although he claimed with a straight face that it was for reasons of economy. He had owned four, he said, and had sold each of the previous three for more than he'd paid for it. We pulled out onto Fifth Avenue, slowly made our way through the sluggish traffic to Madison, and turned right to jerk and grind our way down the steep incline to Alaskan Way.
'God,' Calvin said, 'this traffic gets worse every day. It's all you goddam newcomers. It's really hard on my Porsche.' To Calvin, it was never his car or his automobile. Only his Porsche.
'I'm from San Francisco,' I said. 'This seems like a Sunday drive in the country to me. Calvin, what did you mean, this guy imports old paintings from Italy? That's illegal. You can't get an old painting out of Italy without special government permission.'
'Well, they're not really old. They're just doctored to look old. He runs a firm called Venezia and he imports bushels of them. The Italian government doesn't give a damn about them.'
I looked at him in amazement. 'He imports
'No, high-class fakes that are baked in an oven or whatever they do to make them look old. They're only forgeries if you try to pass them off as the real thing, right? As long as you label something a copy, it's perfectly legal.'
True, but nobody in the legitimate art world is made any happier by knowing that bushels of high-class Old Master copies are floating around. Paintings change hands often and unexpectedly, and what is sold as a replica today has a funny way of turning up on the auction block next year as an original.
'What does he do with bushels of fakes?' I asked.
'He calls them 'authenticated simulated masterpieces,' and he sells them to motels and restaurants who
