A Glancing Light

'Yeah, what does she get paid for undertime, if you know what I mean?'

Blusher had an interesting style. When he was saying something crass, which seemed to be most of the time, he underlined it with a husky, ho-ho-ho delivery, like Art Carney's old 'Norton' character on The Honeymooners. 'This is just a put-on,' he seemed to be saying. 'You don't think I'd really be this vulgar, do you?'

As you can probably tell, I did not take an immediate, indiscriminate liking to Mike Blusher. Louis, my friend- cum-therapist, would have been pleased.

'Well,' he said, 'Let me show you guys what I have. This'll blow you away.' He led us to a gray steel cabinet at the side of the room. The impression of a grossly overweight man slimmed down was reinforced; Blusher walked with the flat-footed waddle of a much fatter man.

The cabinet had large, shelf-like sliding drawers; the kind of thing that libraries use to store big atlases and some dealers use to store pictures horizontally. Blusher wasted no time. He pulled out the top drawer, and there was the van Eyck; a small, wooden panel no more than twelve inches by ten, with a portrait head of a thin, dour man in a great black hat. The signature written carefully across the entire width of the bottom said Joannes de Eyck fecit Anno MCCCCXXI. 30 Octobris. October 30, 1421.

I was impressed. This was an extraordinary piece, a world away from the monstrosities in Blusher's chamber of horrors downstairs. The man's hat was a soft deep velvet you could almost feel. The background was shadowed and indistinct, but rich with a sense of depth, and the whole was done with something very close to that remarkable combination of darkness and luminosity characteristic of the early Flemish work in oils.

Very close, but not quite on the mark. For it was a fake, as I'd supposed. Brilliantly, painstakingly executed, but fake. In the huge, under-the-table market of rich, gullible buyers, even buyers who knew their van Eyck, it would be worth a fortune. For without the aid of the cumbersome, expensive, and infrequently used technology of science—mass spectrometers, computerized thermographic sensors, multistratal X-ray photography—almost anybody would accept it as genuine. And wealthy private buyers lusting for genuine Old Masters of their own rarely had the nerve to bring in the mass spectrometers. For the same reason people with toothaches don't go to the dentist: If there's a problem, they'd rather not know.

I suppose that all this just might raise a question in your mind. I didn't have a mass spectrometer at hand and wouldn't have known what to do with it if I did. So how did I know after a fifteen-second examination that this was spurious? All I can say is, I knew. I have a friend in Italy, an art professor, who was once pressed as to how he could be sure a certain Titian was genuine. His memorable answer: 'I know because when I see a Titian I swoon.' I wouldn't go as far as that on the van Eyck, but I knew. After you've lovingly submerged yourself in a field long enough, the judgments that at first had to be carefully reasoned become intuitive. It's no different than an experienced breeder's ability to size up a horse instantaneously, or a master cabinetmaker's way of telling at a glance how good a piece of furniture is.

It's also the reason art authorities often differ so loudly and so publicly over whether such and such a painting is a genuine Degas or Manet or Duccio. But I had no doubts at all on this one.

'This is a forgery,' I said. 'An extremely good one.'

Blusher's heavy face sagged. 'But—I mean, look at it. I mean . .' His expression changed from shock to resentment, 'How the hell do you know? How does he know, Boyer?'

Calvin spread his hands. 'He's the expert, Mike.'

Blusher turned again to me. The flesh around his lips was a dull, mean purple. 'I had Jake Panofsky in here looking at these'—Panofsky was the owner of a reputable gallery near Pioneer Square—'and he said they looked like the real thing, that I should call the museum. And now you—I mean, shit, how do you know? '

When you're dealing with eminent patrons of the arts, especially big, hostile ones, you can't be too careful. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to get by with 'I just knew.'

Fortunately, beneath that first intuitive response there is always a foundation of solid perception, or there ought to be. And by now I'd been peering at the painting long enough to know what bothered me about it.

'There are several things,' I said. 'First, the craquelure.' Foreign art terms, I have found, usually help establish credibility and cow skeptics.

Not Blusher. He made a disgusted face, 'The which?'

'This crackling in the paint,' explained Calvin, who was beginning to pick up a few things about art in spite of himself. 'That's what makes it look so old.'

'One of the things,' I said. 'It's hard to make craquelure look authentic, and most forgers fall down right there. This is beautifully done, though,'

Blusher glowered at me. 'Then how do you come off—'

'It's the wrong kind of crackling,' I said. 'Whoever did this served his apprenticeship on canvases, not wooden panels. Take a look at the cracks on this one. Look at a light area—his cheek. Do you see any kind of pattern?'

'No,' Blusher grunted after a pause. 'Well, a little. It's sort of in circles, like a spider web.'

'Exactly. And that's just the way old paint and varnish cracks on canvas. But this is wood, and it's wrong for wood. The surface of a painted wooden panel cracks mainly along the wood fibers, in relatively straight lines, not like this. These cracks are artificially done, Mr. Blusher; I'm sorry.'

He expelled a long, noisy breath through his nose. 'Ah, what the hell. It's not your fault, Norgren.' Was he mellowing? I hoped so.

There was more: The picture wasn't painted in van Eyck's style, it was painted to look like his style, and there is a very big difference between the two. Van Eyck's technique was still medieval; each area of a painting was treated like a separate little picture, with no overlapping. And there was no mixing of pigments; each color was applied in a thin, careful coat, one on top of the other, increasing in transparency and saturation. But this panel had been done with easier, quicker techniques that hadn't been invented in the fifteenth century. It was a mark of its excellence that I couldn't be sure whether it had been painted a year ago or a century ago. But definitely not in 1421.

By now I realized what paintings it had been adapted from, for a convincing forgery is seldom hatched full- blown in the forger's mind; it is borrowed from authentic works of the artist. The face was from A Man in a Red Turban, but turned to the right instead of the left; the hat was from the great Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride.

Although I tried explaining all this, I don't think I got through to either of them. But Blusher understood enough to walk a few steps away and drop disconsolately onto a frayed sofa, then lower his head and massage his brow with both hands, as if he'd just heard the end of the world was due tomorrow morning.

There was something going on that I didn't understand. 'Mr. Blusher—'

'Mike, Mike,' he corrected absently, continuing to rub his temples.

'Mike, why is this so important to you? This isn't yours anyway, is it? From what Calvin told me, it's not part of your order. It got included by accident. '

'Of course it got included by accident. You saw the crap downstairs. That's what I order. I already called my shippers about this three times, in Bologna. They don't know how it got included, they don't know where it came from, they don't want anything to do with it.'

     'What's the name of the shipping company?' I asked.

'Salvatore, Salvatori, something like that.'

'Salvatorelli? '

Blusher looked surprised. 'Yeah, you know them?'

I nodded, not too pleased that I'd guessed right. 'We're arranging a show, Northerners in Italy. Salvatorelli's handling the shipping.'

'Nice move, Chris,' Calvin said out of the side of his mouth.

'They're an old firm,' I said unhappily. 'They have a good reputation. The Pinacoteca uses them.'

'Yeah, well, you better count your Brueghels all the same.'

'Anyway,' Blusher continued, 'they said to go ahead and keep the paintings, as far as they're concerned. They didn't want to be bothered. I got that in writing.' His head came up with a sudden shrewd glance. 'Of course, I didn't tell them exactly what we got here.' Down went his head again, into his hands. 'Ah, what difference does it make, if they're fakes?'