painting itself if you look closely. Anyhow, HRTR stands for Henry Treacy. That’s his mark, so he was not going to sell that as an original. Now tell me, does it look like it could have been painted three hundred and thirty years ago?”
“I don’t know. The colors are dark. The paint is cracked everywhere. Thousands of tiny squares.”
“How does it smell?”
Blume made a skeptical face, but brought his nose down to the canvas. “Dusty, woody, a little sweet. It smells old,” he said. “It’s very glossy and hard to see this close.”
“And seeing as you’re that close, can you see any wormholes?”
“Yes,” said Blume. “Quite a few, now.”
“Look just inside the rim of one of the wormholes. What do you see?”
“I see nothing. What am I looking for?”
“Ink or paint.”
Blume moved his head back slightly, and realized he could see the canvas better. Was that the first sign of needing old-man reading glasses?
“I see no ink inside the holes.”
“Of course not. If the painting is genuine, there could be none, since the wormholes are supposed to come after the composition, so how would color get into them unless it was false-new paint on old canvas, see?”
“Yes.”
“And yet, convincing though this may seem, it wasn’t good enough for him to market. He liked it enough to sign it. Maybe he used it to show what he could do. Personally, I think he darkened the tone too far. Treacy ran the most incredible risks. His whole left cheek was wrinkled and scarred from burns he gave himself back in the ’80s from boiling oil. He tried to create black oil to darken a painting, and mixed it with mastic varnish. Knowing him, he probably did it next to cans of turps and benzene, too.”
“Yes. He had a beard that covered most of the scars.”
“He grew a beard? My, my,” said the Colonel. “It really has been some time since I saw him. I can’t picture him with a beard. Always so vain. He even thought his scar was romantic.”
Blume looked at the back of the canvas again. “It’s got faded stamps, mildew, even some old netting or something, like it came from somewhere else. It’s convincing.”
“Yet this is one of his rejects,” said the Colonel. “I don’t suppose you’d be so kind as to pass me that bowl…”
Blume passed a bowl of fruit to the Colonel, who plucked out an apple and bit it in half. “Floury, old. A still-life apple,” he said. “Disgusting.” He finished it with four more bites and balanced the core on the arm of his chair. “Let me tell you what made Henry Treacy special. He had no artistic personality. I don’t mean in real life. He had too much in real life. But when it came to painting, he had no personality at all.”
The Colonel picked up and tossed the core of his apple toward the fireplace. It missed and came to rest beside the bookshelf, just below the gap left by the removal of two marbled notebooks. The Colonel did not speak for a moment, and Blume felt sure he must be staring at the same empty spot. Then he heard a grunt and a crunch, as the Colonel helped himself to another apple and bit into it.
Keeping his movements leisurely, Blume withdrew his gaze from the empty slot on the shelves, and said, “Is no personality a good or a bad thing?”
“For a forger, it’s good.” The Colonel took another bite, and swallowed without chewing. “To know without being known.” He finished the apple and this time dropped the core back into the bowl, then casually fingered a leopard-skin banana. “To know without being known,” he repeated. “It’s a good philosophy for policemen and for serious artists, as well as for forgers. It’s the opposite for politicians and junk celebrities. They want to be known without knowing.”
“And Treacy?”
“I think he began to be attracted by notoriety. So he began to want to be known, which is suicidal if you’re a forger.”
“Suicidal or the sort of thing that can get you killed?” asked Blume.
“Good point. What you don’t want is notoriety or personality. You do not want people to be able to point at a work and say: That’s a Treacy.”
“So he adopted the personality of the painter he was copying?” said Blume.
“Not the personality. What I mean is he didn’t let his own come through. You’re an American, so you must have been brought up watching Westerns, right?”
“Westerns are more your generation, Colonel. I was more into Starsky and Hutch.”
“What’s that?”
“ Kojak, you’ve heard of Kojak?”
“Yes,” said the Colonel.
“Well, Starsky and Hutch were… Never mind. They were nothing like Kojak. Rockford Files? Harry O? ”
The Colonel was shaking his head impatiently.
“ Hawaii Five-0. Jesus, I loved that,” said Blume. He thought of Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, turning around to look straight at the camera, those three strands of hair out of place, an effect that he used to try and imitate in front of the mirror. Jack Lord had a scar on his face, too, come to think of it. He brought his attention back to the Colonel. “You were saying something about Westerns.”
“Westerns are always set in the 1880s or 1890s,” said the Colonel.
“Well, you’re the expert,” said Blume. “But the American Old West goes back at least to the Gold Rush, which was 1848.”
“I’m not interested in that now,” said the Colonel.
“First you start talking about Westerns, now you’re not interested.”
“You are being obtuse, Commissioner.” The Colonel took the banana, peeled it, and examined the fruit and nodded in approval. He pressed half the banana into his mouth, paused, then spoke.
“When you watch a Western, you can always tell when it was made. They try to dress like it was the nineteenth century, but you can clearly see the styles of the 1940s or ’50s or ’60s in the clothes, in the makeup, the hairstyles. And that’s not even counting the colors used in the print. It takes, what, about five seconds for you to recognize the decade in which the film was made, even without seeing an actor. The personality of the period comes through.”
“True,” said Blume.
“And yet the directors at the time were usually trying to make things look as nineteenth century as possible.” He ate the second half of the banana. “It’s the same thing with forgers. You keep looking at one of their works, and you get a feel for when it was really painted, not when it was supposed to be. Naturally, this makes it easier to spot forgeries from the past, from the 1940s or 1950s, say. Forgeries made now are harder to spot, not because they’re better, but because we are incapable of seeing the style of our own time. We’re too close. We watch a Western made in the last few years, it looks more accurate than the ones made in the 1950s. That’s the beauty of Henry Treacy’s work. It doesn’t have a strong personality. Nothing comes through. He’s timeless.”
The Colonel put the banana skin on the table, struggled, and rose from his chair and walked over to the davenport desk. He opened a drawer that Blume had completely missed earlier and pulled out a rolled-up piece of paper, and, holding it reverently, showed it to Blume. “Beautiful buff paper, but machine-made, so no attempt at passing it off as authentic, but look at the skill.”
Blume saw a yellow and gray image of a woman looking down at her foot.
“This is where he excelled. This is what he sold. Of course he used paper from the period.”
“Where did he get it?”
“All sort of places. Fly leaves in old books, old paintings or drawings. Old sketchbooks. You saw that Latin missal in the kitchen? That would have made a good source of paper. What do you think it is?”
“A woman hitching up her dress, turning out her foot-it looks unfinished,” said Blume. “He didn’t do her other foot.”
“What we do is we search through the paintings of Raphael, Bronzino, Parmigianino, or Annibale Carracci.”
“We?”
“You and I. Let me finish, Commissioner. If we find this woman, or a woman in this pose, or something that
