Cold War

site-workers, it did not strike Christine as unusual to find his car in the drive. At any rate, she’d knocked on the door and got no answer. Knocked some more, no answer. Then she’d rung the bell. Still no one came to the door. All the while she could hear the child crying inside the house, which caused her some growing disturbance. After another ten minutes of knocking and bell-ringing, Christine let herself in with a spare key Claire had given her to use in a pinch, and called out from the entry hall, again without response. With her opinion of Mr. Mackay being what it was, and no sign of Claire, and the baby shrieking its lungs out, Christine’s concern led her toward the nursery, at which point she passed the open bedroom door, was confronted with the sight of the two dead bodies, and rushed to phone the police, something she could not afterward recall having done in her trauma.

The rest was distraught babble, and a free-flowing tirade of slurs and accusations against the deceased Mr. Mackay.

Now Gorrie clicked the tip back into his pen and glanced out the bedside window. A newly arrived trio of official vehicles had joined the line of police cars that had preceded them into the front drive. A patrol cruiser led the pack. It was followed by a forensics van, and an ambulance. None of them had its flasher or siren on. The damage was done, they were in no hurry, why stir up the entire neighborhood?

Gorrie watched the patrol car’s driver and passenger doors swing open to break the horizontal orange stripes painted across both sides. Watched Robertson and a female social worker exit the car and start toward the house. Then he shifted his eyes to the ambulance at the rear, and watched the emergency medical technicians leave their vehicle for what was no longer an emergency at all, but rather a nasty cleanup job.

Gorrie frowned again. The evidence would be collected and examined, the bodies taken to the morgue for autopsy, and the child passed on to relatives or foster care, depending on who was or wasn’t out there in the world for him. Gorrie and his constables would conduct their follow-up inquiries of family, friends, and acquaintances. And when the case report was filed, his instincts told him it would be written up as an explosive domestic incident, the tale of a marriage gone as bad as they got, its last act an eternal mystery to everyone but the two who’d played it out here in the cold, violated intimacy of its setting.

Better they’d gone their separate ways indeed.

Feeling the sudden need for a breath of fresh air, Gorrie turned from the bed and went outside the house onto the lawn.

FOUR

PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 2, 2002

Marc Elata folded his arms so that he held his elbows in the palms of each hand. He stood still before the statue as the American couple and their four-year-old brat — a four-year-old, at the Louvre! — staggered past him on the steps. Elata held his breath, willing himself past the moment, past their babble: “Do you think the Mona Lisa will smile for us?” said the father, as if the portrait were a carnival trick. The four-year-old whined about wanting more French fries, and when were they going to see a train?

A tour group swelled up on the landing behind him, chattering in Swedish or something Nordic; Elata pushed himself to move on, following the Americans in their quest for the undying smile. If it weren’t for the fact that he wanted to see several paintings — several master-pieces — displayed in the same room as the Mona Lisa, he might have pointed them in the proper direction as they continued up the stairs. This way he would have known where they were, making them easy to avoid.

A thick knot formed in front of da Vinci’s most famous painting; the crowd was a permanent feature of the room. Elata walked past it, glancing at the equally beautiful though far less famous da Vincis alongside, but not wanting to go near the rabble to admire them. He had Ucello and Pierro in mind; he had not thought about the Renaissance masters lately, and wanted to consider their problems of shade and perspective as an antidote to Picasso, whom he’d had so much of over the past seven days.

An exceedingly fat French woman brushed against him as he walked. Elata stopped, gave her a nasty look — but she was oblivious, chattering to her almost equally rotund companion about the uselessness— inutile—of art. Elata spoke little French, and that word specifically might be interpreted as edging toward “vanity” rather than uselessness, but he had an ear for such conversations. He had heard them all his life, beginning at his own dinner table when he’d expressed his desire at age eight to become an artist.

Which, despite everything, he had become. If a forger might be considered an artist.

The human brain’s ability to draw fine distinctions cannot be overstated, especially in the gray realm of morality and ethics. Elata’s mind was particularly supple; it had no great difficulty justifying his actions. First and foremost, there was the need to survive; he had to eat. If he had come quite a distance from the days when he was truly starving — as the Rolex and privately tailored sports coat he wore over his jeans attested — that distance was not so great as to dim the memory.

His second justification was that he was actually an artist. As such, he not only understood what the masters he imitated were doing, he extended it. Copying them had become part of his art, part of the great tradition of master and student that many of them had followed during their own apprenticeship. He learned their style and technique, then addressed himself to subjects as they would have. He did not copy paintings directly. If, when he was finished, others believed that the work on his easel had been done by the master himself, that was irrelevant to him. Elata himself never passed the paintings off as anything other than his own. And as far as he knew, those who sold them did not either.

That this knowledge was a product of willful ignorance made no difference to him morally, even if it might make such baubles as the Rolex possible.

And then there was the final justification, the grand and undebatable one — art itself. For art transcended all. It transcended da Vinci as surely as it transcended Marc Elata. It transcended Picasso, it transcended Elata’s present employer and greatest patron, Gabriel Morgan. It endured and would endure, even if every work in this museum were burned tomorrow.

Elata shuddered and turned abruptly, afraid that he had somehow inadvertently shared his thoughts with the rest of the room. But he had not. The tourists continued to wander through like cows grazing in a field.

He glanced at his watch. Still another three hours to kill.

Elata had not come to Paris to prepare himself for another round of paintings. His job was quite different — Morgan had hired him to detect a forgery rather than produce one.

Elata had done this sort of thing before. He had examined a Giotto supposedly passed down from the Nazis, steering Morgan away because of a tint under one of the eyes — a careless trick in an otherwise competent job. He had stuck to his opinion despite the arguments of two academic authenticators; in the end, Morgan had listened to him and passed on the painting, though not without regret. The painting had subsequently surfaced in an Australian collection, where a fresh and rather destructive laboratory analysis of it had denounced it as a fake — a careless piece of priming gave it away.

From that point on, Morgan insisted on Elata viewing every important piece he bought. Or so Morgan claimed, though Elata suspected that he did not. But the fact that he said so increased the pressure; the forger turned authenticator feared greatly making a mistake. Morgan no doubt considered this as big an incentive as his sizable fees.

Morgan did not rely on psychology or money alone. He made sure his expert was supplied with the proper tools to aid his judgment. In this case, he had arranged for Elata to receive a small piece of paper containing a sketch and swatch of paint. The fact that this piece of paper — a letter by Picasso, exceedingly rare because it contained a description and rough sketch as well as a dab of paint — belonged not to Morgan but to the Musee Picasso was of no consequence to Elata’s conscience, though it necessitated certain physical arrangements, this trip to Paris the primary one.

Elata folded and unfolded his arms, moving through the Louvre gallery. He had hoped looking at the paintings would consume some of his nervous energy, but it was no use. He was due at the Musee Picasso at precisely 2:10; he did not wish to arrive early and inadvertently draw attention to himself, but he had difficulty throttling his energy. He was not a patient man. He could not pretend to be a patient man. As a painter he attacked, he sprinted, he moved at the speed of thought; it could be an asset in art, but in life it made for rising blood pressure and insatiable boredom. It took his attention from the de Vries sculpture of Mercury and Psyche as he passed down the steps and