A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery) (35 page)

“That was not my fault,” he said before she could say anything. “He slowed down without any warning. You saw that, didn’t you?”

She tugged on her seat belt to make sure it was secure. “I’ll tell you what the most adventurous times of my life are, Geoff. When I’m driving with you.”

“Now that was hurtful,” he said cheerfully, “and I think I shall change the subject. I was speaking with an old associate of mine—did you just make a face?”

“No. I was thinking about it, but I didn’t. How would you know, anyway? You’re not looking at me.”

“No, but I know you, so let me clarify. By ‘old associate,’ I did not mean some fellow miscreant—”

“Geoff, I didn’t—”

“I meant an associate from my days as a conservator, Marie-Élise Audet, who in times past was a conservation and scientific research technician at the Met and is now the head of oil painting evaluation at the
Laboratoire Forensique Pour l’Art
.”

Her sleepiness evaporated. She sat up straight. “Oh?”

“As you might guess, our conversation centered on Papadakis’s sham Manet and how it was that it managed to get by the laboratory’s evaluation process. And…” He turned briefly away from the wheel to flash a self-satisfied grin at her. “… I believe I have come up with the answer.” He waited for her response.

“I’m impressed. Let’s hear it.”

“As you know, the
Laboratoire
’s signature analytical method relies on drilling a core sample from the painting. Well, when Marie-Élise reread their contract with Papadakis, she found that he had put in an extremely unusual proviso: that the sample be taken not from the visible face of the painting, but from the extreme margin of the canvas, the part hidden by the frame.”

“But why would that be unusual? I’d think no one would want a hole drilled right through the face of their painting.”

“For several reasons. It costs the owner more, it takes more time, and, given the amazing techniques employed by the
Laboratoire,
it isn’t necessary. They are able to work with a core sample that is less than the breadth of a human hair—the hole is a mere pinpoint, quite undetectable.”

“Ah. And so that made your friend suspicious?”

“Not at the time, no. In working with art collectors, one soon learns to expect some very strange conditions, provisos, and demands. But when I heard about it, it made
me
suspicious. Now, the forgery itself is back in Panos’s hands and I don’t believe there’s any legal way of obtaining it to check on what I’m thinking—it’s his property, after all—so what I’m about to suggest is entirely speculative, but I believe someone with Christoph’s skills could certainly have managed it. I think he—”

“Geoff, you don’t want to turn off here. This is the way to your place, not mine.”

“Sh, stop interrupting. What I think he did was to cut the original painting, the one from which he’d been copying, out of its frame, leaving the canvas’s margin where it was, beneath the frame. Then he glued the fake painting in its place, first
extremely
carefully matching the edges. And then he glued a new lining to the back, thus covering any signs of what he’d done from that side. So… when the laboratory took its core from the part under the frame, they
were
drilling into the original canvas. Unfortunately, it happened to be the only part of the original canvas that was left.”

“Mm.”

He looked at her, lips pursed. “You perceive a problem?”

“I perceive two problems. First, when they analyzed their core, it would have shown immediately that the lining was new, not old. Second, Weisskopf might have been good enough to hide the telltale signs of cutting and gluing on the front from the average person, but from the lab? I don’t think so, no matter how ‘extremely careful’ he was.”

“Oh, really?” Geoff said smugly. “Well, first, for your information, the core is used to analyze layers from the canvas
up
—the canvas itself, sizing, ground, paints, glaze, varnish. Not the lining, if there is one. An analysis of the lining would contribute nothing to the determination of authenticity, since most paintings this old have been relined more than once, often many times. As you know. Second, those ‘telltale signs,’ even if present—which I doubt—would be underneath the frame, and would be apparent only if the frame were removed and they were specifically looked for, which there was no reason to do in this case.”

Alix thought about it and slowly nodded. “Geoff, I humbly apologize; that makes a lot of sense.” But then, a second later: “Wait a minute, though, we think Weisskopf did Mrs. Papadakis’s fake Monet too, and yet the lab
did
catch that. Why would that be?”

“Probably because Christoph did not go to all that trouble—and it would have been a lot of trouble—with the Monet. You see, any good forger-for-hire would have a wide range of prices for a wide range of services. My guess is that Mrs. Papadakis did not go top of the line. It may be that she had no knowledge that such services could be commissioned, or perhaps the additional money was not available to her.” He pulled into a parking space, turned off the engine and smiled at her. “There. Everything tied up nicely and neatly to your satisfaction?”

“As far as the paintings go, yes, but I hope you won’t be offended if I point out that this is not the curb in front of the building in which I live; this is the parking lot in front of the warehouse in which you live.”

“Yes, of course it is. You’re coming upstairs to dinner.”

What with the ten-hour time difference between Athens and Seattle and the miserable flight home, it had been a long and fatiguing day for her, and all she wanted to do was to get to her own private, personal, homey space and sack out. This was not the day to face Geoff’s living circumstances for the first time.

“I’m kind of tired, Geoff. I think maybe next—”

“Absolutely not. I’ve gone to considerable trouble in preparing the meal, and ‘no’ is not an option.”

“
You’re
preparing dinner?” She had never known his food preparation to go beyond opening a can of soup or (less frequently) heating a frozen dinner, the kind that came with everything in one box, separated into little compartments, dessert included.

He swiveled slowly in his seat. “You find that improbable?”

“No, not at all, just wondering what we’re having, Campbell’s Tomato or Campbell’s Split Pea.”

Up rolled his eyes. “ ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth’… No, I thought we might enjoy a stroll down memory lane. I have all the ingredients for what used to be your favorite beach picnic in those long-ago days at Watch Hill. You probably don’t remember—Laughing Cow cheese—”

“—fish fingers, cherry yogurt, chocolate milk, and ham and cucumber sandwiches cut into eighths. No mayo.”

“You remember. I’m touched,” he said lightly, but she could see that he was. It warmed her heart.

“That sounds wonderful; I would love it,” she said and meant it.

But her enthusiasm waned when they opened the metal entrance door and stepped into that dank and depressing corridor of raw concrete with its two naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Then through the austere cubicles that constituted the “offices” (the sign on the frosted glass now down to
Of s)
. Beyond this, she had never been. They came to a roomy old freight elevator with torn and soiled padding, which they took up to the second floor. Facing them was another formidable steel door, not as banged up as the one below, but bad enough with its peeling, dirty-white paint that showed the old, underlying green. Geoff tapped in a security code, turned the doorknob, stepped back, and offered a little bow.

“Welcome to my castle,” he said.

Alix took a breath before stepping in.
Tell him it’s nice, tell him you really like it, tell him—

“My God,” she burst out, “it’s spectacular!”

She had seen one or two nicely done warehouse lofts in New York’s SoHo district, but none like this. Like the New York ones, this was a single cavernous room separated into living areas by head-high, freestanding walls, furniture groupings, and metal support elements, but what a room! The movable interior walls were covered with beige fabric, the exterior walls either painted a creamy off-white or paneled with woods that wouldn’t have been out of place on the
Artemis.
Windows, of which there were more than might have been expected, were frosted on the street side—the view would have been of similar drab buildings across the street—but clear and large on the back side, from which the downtown Seattle skyline could be seen above the nearby roofs. Glass doors opened onto a small deck overlooking a surprising brick-walled garden below, with
benches, a little dining table, and a brick path that wandered among shrubs and small trees. On that side of the loft, the north side, were his workroom—she could see the equipment, smell the glue and shellac—and a tiny kitchen, minimally equipped but with handsome granite countertops. On the south side were his bedroom and bath, partially shielded by the largest of the partitions. The living room, where she now stood, ran from one side of the loft to the other. Except for the tiled kitchen, the floor was a gleaming expanse of satiny cherrywood.

She was so relieved, so pleased, that she could hardly speak. “Geoff… this is… this is… it must have cost…”

He beamed at her. “Well, the boys helped quite a bit, you know, and you’d be amazed at what one can find on Craigslist, but it’s true; I’ve had a very good year, child. In fact, I’m about to provide employment for another new worker.”

Ah
, she thought,
another old friend must have gotten out of jail. Well, that sort of thing was certainly working out for him so far. Tiny and Frisby were both great.

“Now go and sit over there”—he pointed to a white leather Scandinavian armchair, part of a grouping that faced a propane fireplace with a cheerful fire already going—“while I do the finishing touches on our meal; there’s a good girl.” He began to busy himself in the kitchen but then poked his head around the partition that separated it from the living room. “Would you like a glass of wine while you wait?”

“I’ll wait for the chocolate milk,” she said, heading for the indicated seat, but the warmth from the fire felt so good that instead she went to sit on the hearth that had been constructed around it, basking in the heat that went a long way toward unknotting her neck and shoulders. It was going to take her a while to get reused to the weather in Seattle, where a fire was a welcome thing the third week in May. Facing in this direction, she could see more directly into the workroom, where there was an old table littered with tools, tubes of glue, segments of picture frame, and what looked like bases and pedestals for the gimcrack frippery that constituted Venezia’s inventory of objets d’art.

“Looks like you’re keeping busy enough,” she called. “Working on anything interesting?”

“Oh, yes, very much so. I’ll show you later. Alix, was I supposed to thaw the fish first? And how long am I supposed to—oh, never mind, there are directions on the package. It’ll be ten minutes. Are you keeping yourself entertained?”

“Sure,” she said, getting up and going to the workroom to have a look for herself. Once inside, she saw that there was a nook in one corner that couldn’t be seen from the living room, almost as if it had been arranged that way on purpose, so naturally that was where she went.

One step into it, and she came to a halt. “Oh no, don’t tell me…” she murmured. “Please let this not be what it looks like. Please let there be a simple explanation.”

She was standing before an easel on which was a handsome oil painting about two feet by three. On the fabric-covered wall facing it were pinned-up reproductions of similar paintings, most of which she knew and which any serious student of art history would know. All were by that much-loved darling of forgers, the mid-nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot—of whom Tiny had joked, “painted almost two thousand paintings just in the last ten years of his life. Three thousand of them are in the United States, a thousand of them are in Asia, and the rest of them are still in Europe.”

The Corot-like painting on the easel was without doubt a forgery, and a brand-spanking-new one at that, which it didn’t take a connoisseur’s eye to discern. It was only half finished, and the smell of the paint was still strong. She shook her head with disbelief as she looked at it.
This was his ‘new venture’? God help us; here we go again.

It wasn’t a copy of an existing picture, like Panos’s Monet and Manet had been, but part invention, part pastiche, as most forgeries are. The pictures on the wall had been used as guides to come up with a completely new painting, but one that was unmistakably in the style of Corot. This was not Corot’s late style, though—the sketchy, loosely painted pictures of nymphs
and cherubs in blurry gray-green dells that were so easy to fake; this was early Corot, Corot at his masterly best—the Piazza San Marco in Venice, exquisitely exact, with needle-sharp outlines, meticulous brushwork, and so clear a definition of every object, architectural detail, and person in it that you had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t a photograph. This was a style that only a crazy person would think of trying to duplicate.

A crazy person or Geoff. No wonder the three of them had found the Corot story so hilarious, damn them.

When she turned to stamp out to the kitchen and confront him she found him standing right behind her smiling broadly.

“What do you think? Not too bad, eh? I haven’t quite—”

“Oh, Geoff, how could you? After all you’ve put us through…” Her throat constricted. She didn’t know whether she was feeling anger or pity, but whatever it was, it was intense.

His expression was as blank and surprised as she had ever seen it, but after a moment it cleared. “I think,” he said with a smile, “that you may have gotten the wrong idea.”

“What, you didn’t paint this?”

“I did paint it.”

“And it’s not a fake Corot?”

“It is a
genuine
fake Corot, or will be when I’ve finished.”

A couple of beats passed. Geoff continued to smile. “Is there something I’m not getting here?” Alix asked.