The Modigliani Scandal (1976)

?I?ve opened us a bank account—under false names.?

?What names??

?George Hollows and Philip Cox. They?re colleagues of mine at the college. For references, I gave the Principal and the College Secretary.?

?Isn?t that dangerous??

?No. There are over fifty lecturers at the college, so the connection with me is pretty thin. The bank would have written to the referees and asked whether Hollows and Cox were in fact lecturers and lived at the addresses given. They will get told yes.?

?Suppose the referees mention it to Hollows or Cox??

?They won?t see them. It?s four weeks to the new term, and I happen to know that they aren?t social friends.?

Peter smiled. ?You have done well.? He heard the front door open, and Anne?s voice called hello. ?Up here;? he shouted.

She came in and kissed him. ?I gather it went off all right;? she said. There was a sparkle of excitement in her eyes.

?Well enough,? Peter replied. He looked back to Mitch. ?The next step is the grand tour, isn?t it??

?Yes. That?s down to you, I think.?

Anne said: ?If you two don?t need me, the baby does.? She went out.

?Why me?? said Peter.

?Anne and I mustn?t be seen in the galleries before delivery day.?

Peter nodded. ?Sure. Let?s go over it, then.?

?I?ve listed the top ten galleries here. You can get around them all in a day. You look first of all for what they ?ve got plenty of and what they?re short of. If we?re going to offer them a picture, we might as well be sure it?s one they need.

?Secondly, the painter has to be easily forgeable. He must be dead, he must have a large body of work, and there can be no complete record of his work anywhere. We?re not going to copy masterpieces—we?re going to paint our own. You find one painter like that for each gallery, make a note, then go on to the next.?

?Yes—we?ll also have to exclude anyone who habitually used any specialized kinds of material. You know, everything would be much easier if we limited ourselves to watercolors and drawings.?

?We couldn?t raise the kind of money we need to make a spectacular splash.?

?How much d?you think we?ll raise altogether??

?I shall be disappointed if it?s less than half a million.?

An atmosphere of concentration filled the big studio. Through the open windows, the warm August breeze brought distant traffic murmurs. For a long while the three people worked in a silence broken only by the contented gurgling of the baby in a playpen in the middle of the room.

The baby?s name was Vibeke, and she was just a year old. Normally she would have demanded attention from the adults in the room; but today she was playing with a new toy, a plastic box. She found that sometimes the lid would go on, and sometimes it would not; and she was trying to figure out what made the difference. She too was concentrating.

Her mother sat nearby at a battered table, writing with a fountain pen in meticulous copperplate script on a sheet of Meunier?s letterhead. The table was littered with opened books: glamorous coffee table art books, heavy tomes of reference, and small learned articles in paper covers. Occasionally Anne?s tongue would stick out of the comer of her mouth as she labored.

Mitch stood back from his canvas and gave a long sigh. He was working on a fairly large Cubist Picasso of a bullfight; one of the series of paintings which led up to the Guernica. There was a sketch on the floor beside his easel. He looked at it now, and deep frown-lines gouged his forehead. He lifted his right hand and made a series of passes at his canvas, painting a line in the air until he thought he had it right; then with a quick final stroke he put the brush to the canvas.

Anne heard the sigh, and looked up, first at Mitch and then at the canvas. A kind of stunned admiration came over her face. ?Mitch, it?s brilliant,? she said.

He smiled gratefully.

?Really, could anyone do that?? she added.

?No,? he said slowly. ?It?s a specialized talent. Forgery for artists is a bit like mimicry for actors. Some of the greatest actors are lousy mimics. It?s just a trick which some people can do.?

Peter said: ?How are you getting on with those provenances??

?I?ve done the Braque and the Munch, and I?m just finishing the Picasso,? Anne replied. ?What kind of pedigree would your van Gogh have??

Peter was reworking the picture he had done in the Masterpiece Race. He had a book of color plates open beside him, and he frequently flicked over a page. The colors on his canvas were dark, and the lines heavy. The body of the gravedigger was powerful yet weary.

?It would have been painted between 1880 and 1886,? Peter began. ?In his Dutch period. Nobody would have bought it then, I don?t suppose. Say it was in his possession—or better, his brother Theo?s—for a few years. Then bought by some fictional collector in Brussels. Turned up by a dealer in the 1960s. You can invent the rest.?

?Shall I use the name of a real dealer??

?Might as well—only make him an obscure one—German, say.?

?Mmm.? The room became quiet again as the three returned to their work. After a while Mitch took down his canvas and began a new one, a Munch. He put on a pale gray wash over the whole surface, to get the brittle Norwegian light which pervaded so many of Munch?s paintings. From time to time he closed his eyes and tried to rid his mind of the warm English sunshine in the studio. He tried to make himself feel cold, and succeeded so well that he shivered.

Three loud knocks at the front door shattered the silence.

Peter, Mitch and Anne looked at one another blankly. Anne got up from the desk and went to the window. She turned to the men, her face white.

?It?s a policeman,? she said.

They looked at her with astonished incredulity. Mitch was the first to adjust.

?Go to the door, Peter,? he said. ?Anne, hide those provenances and the notepaper and stamp. I?ll turn the canvases with their faces to the walls. Let?s go!?

Peter walked slowly down the stairs, his heart in his mouth. It just did not make sense—mere was no way the law could be on to them already. He opened the front door.

The policeman was a tall young constable with short hair and a sparse mustache. He said: ?Is that your car outside, sir??

?Yes—I mean no,? Peter stuttered. ?Which one??

?The blue Mini with things painted all over the wings.?

?Ah—it belongs to a friend. He?s a guest here at the moment.?

?Perhaps you?d like to tell him he?s left his sidelights on,? said the bobby. ?Good day, sir.? He turned away.

?Oh! Thank you!? Peter said.

He went back up the stairs. Anne and Mitch looked at him with fear in their eyes.

Peter said: ?He asked me to tell you that you?ve left your sidelights on, Mitch.?

There was a moment of uncomprehending silence. Then all three of them burst out into a loud, almost hysterical laughter.

In her playpen, Vibeke looked up at the sudden noise. Her startled look dissolved into a smile, and she joined enthusiastically in the laughter, as if she perfectly understood the joke.

PART THREE

Figures in the Foreground