'Right. Yes. Can't talk now. Emergency. Gotta run. Call you soon. 'Bye.'
I left the telephone off the hook, pulled the blinds, took two more codeine, and went numbly back to bed for the rest of the day.
On Tuesday I woke up late, feeling good again, my trusty subconscious having wedged Rita's call into the furthest, dimmest corner of my mind. Plenty of time to deal with that later. With great pleasure I tossed the remaining codeine tablets into the wastepaper basket and went downstairs for a hefty lunch of hamburger and fries. After that I took care of a few chores in the office and then went to the Clipper Room to see what headway I could make on the 'minor problem' of Peter's forgery.
While I'd been on my back, Earl Flittner and crew had been busy. The Plundered Past was very nearly ready for public viewing. Most of the partitions, smelling of glue and freshly sawed wood, were in place, and some of the pictures were already hung. The others were leaning against the walls. Flittner was up on a ladder doing something with the lights, and two men I didn't know-Anne's people, I supposed-were on their knees by the entrance, installing what must have been an intrusion-detection system.
Before I got down to thinking about forgeries, I wandered around the exhibit simply for the pleasure of looking at the paintings. I respectfully admired some I hadn't seen before: a swirling, vertiginous Wind and Snow of Turner's; a serene, early self-portrait by Durer, the first major artist to be fascinated with his own image.
Others I greeted happily, like the old acquaintances they were, either from photographs or from seeing them in museums to which Bolzano had lent them: Piero della Francesca's softly glowing Madonna and Child, with a lively dwarf of a bambino as charmingly repulsive as only a fifteenth-century artist could make an infant; and Gainsborough's sedate Henry Colchester and His Family, who peered coolly out of their frame at me, complacent and incurious, as if they never doubted that they were solid flesh and blood, and blue blood at that, but they weren't quite sure what I might be.
The show wasn't big enough for the conventional arrangement into little bays and rooms (Mannerism and the High Renaissance, Seventeenth-Century Minor Dutch Masters, etc.). Instead they were simply hung chronologically, well separated, each painting with an informational plaque at its side. The only exceptions to this staid progression were an inconspicuous alcove near the exit, where the copies of the twelve still-missing paintings were modestly hung (with the sad exception of the 'Michelangelo'), and a dramatic three-sided bay, draped with green silk brocade, which was the centerpiece of the room and of the exhibition. Here three paintings were dramatically displayed: the newly discovered cache from Hallstatt. I had kept this for last on purpose, saving it the way a kid puts off the best part of dinner.
They were superb. A florid, frenzied Rape of the Sabines by Rubens, one of many versions, looked less like a rape than a good party that had gotten a little out of hand, but the composition was awesome, and the flesh tones, with liberal applications of his brightest, blushingest rapine pink, were marvelous. The Titian was sensual and robust too-a sexy Venus and the Lute Player. There are also several versions of this painting, and this was one of the best, broadly painted with a grand and sure-handed disregard for detail.
And then, seemingly from a different universe, the Vermeer. Of all painters, with the possible exception of Rembrandt, it is Vermeer who strikes the deepest chord in me. But Rembrandts are plentiful; there are hundreds of paintings, etchings, drawings. In all the world, however, there are only thirty undisputed Vermeers, with another dozen arguables-forty-two at the outside-and this, of course, was one I had never seen before. Bolzano had actually owned two Vermeers, the only private collector who did. Both had been taken for Hitler's museum in Linz by the fuhrer's designated art-looting unit, the ERR, but the other, A Woman Peeling Apples, had never been recovered. A fine copy hung with the rest of the copies in the cheerless corner by the exit.
But the other one, thank God, was back in this world, right in front of me, and I stood looking at it for a long time. When you look at a Vermeer, even after a Durer or a Piero, it's as if you've been seeing things through badly focused binoculars and someone just turned the knob; everything is gemlike, focused, sharper than reality itself.
I knew the painting from photographs, and I'd even devoted several pages to it in my book on Vermeer. Young Woman at the Clavichord, done in Delft in 1665 or 1666. The remarkable, transparent light came, as usual, from a window on the left. The woman was, as always, static, cool, sweetly remote, arranged like a still life with her clavichord in front of simple furniture on a black-and-white-tiled floor.
I checked to make sure Flittner was looking the other way, then stretched out a forefinger, as gently as God reaching to Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and touched her wrist. It was an offense for which I would have mercilessly put before a firing squad any hapless visitor caught doing it in the San Francisco County Museum of Art. I did it judgmentally, thoughtfully, as if I were making an arcane assessment of texture or brushstroke, but this was only in case Flittner should look around. Actually, my reasons were the same as any gawking tourist's: the awed desire to 'connect' across the centuries with the great Vermeer. Here, where his brush, possibly his very fingers, touched, I now touched, so that our paths crossed in space if not in time.
I don't do this very often. I certainly don't think it's the sort of thing a curator ought to do, and I never heard another curator confess even to the desire (of course, neither have I), but it gives me a deep, soul-filling pleasure, never more than when it's Vermeer to whom I reach out. I touched the pearls around her throat, like droplets of pure light-
'How's it going, Chris?'
To say I almost jumped out of my skin would be overstating it, so let's just say I gave a guilty start.
'Harry! Whew! Is that why you wear those rubber soles? So you can sneak up on innocent people?'
He cackled delightedly. 'What were you doing, anyway?'
'Doing? What was I doing? Well, I was just, uh, moistening my finger and, uh, clearing things up a little.' When he didn't laugh in my face, I took courage and went on.
'Wetting old varnish lets you see through it more clearly, and when you're checking the authenticity of the painting, the first thing you want to do is get a good look at the signature. Most of the decent fakes floating around are old, you see, and they weren't painted as forgeries in the first place; they got to be forgeries when someone changed the original signature of some competent but unknown artist of the time and substituted a more famous one; Vermeer's, for example. Sometimes a close look can show you the signs of doctoring.'
That was a long answer to a simple question and Harry looked quizzically up at me, a finger curled in the hair behind his ear. 'Is that right? That's interesting. But you were rubbing the middle, weren't you? Artists don't sign in the middle of a picture. Or do they?'
'I wasn't rubbing it,' I said, to set the record straight. 'I was touching it. Very lightiy. Anyway, painters sign anywhere: on an arch, on a piece of furniture, over a doorway, on a bracelet, on a blank wall. Vermeer frequently signed in the middle of a picture.' All true enough, generally speaking, but where was the signature on Young Woman at the Clavichord? I hadn't found the damn thing yet.
'Oh, I see. So tell me, did you find anything suspicious?'
Was I being interrogated, or was he just curious? I couldn't tell. He had a self-effacing way of asking questions that was meek but insistent, and a way of listening that was both intense and amicable, as if he might be probing for something but also happened to find what you were saying of genuine and extraordinary interest. A handy manner for a cop.
'No,' I said, still trying to find Vermeer's name, 'nothing that's caught my eye so far.'
Harry studied the painting and chewed on the inside of his cheek. 'You know, I don't know much about art-I mean, I know what I like, but that's about it-but now that I look at it, I think I might have been just a little suspicious about this signature.'
'Oh? Really?' By now I wished dearly that I'd had the nerve in the first place to admit that I had been pawing the Vermeer for the love of it, but I was in too deep. 'Why is that?' I asked. I still didn't even know where the hell the signature was.
'Because,' he said blandly, 'somebody else signed it.'
Fortunately, I located the signature just as he mentioned it. It was roughly in the middle, all right, on the rim of an oval mirror. And Harry was right. It was not the usual 'IV Meer,' or any of the monograms with which Vermeer sometimes signed his work. It read, quite clearly, 'Pieter de Hoogh.'
Harry was grinning at me, pleased with himself. 'Now how about telling me what the hell is going on around here?'
'Going on? Nothing. And as a matter of fact, that signature confirms its being a genuine Vermeer. In a paradoxical. way, of course.'
