A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (17 page)

Chris glanced at her watch as they went back down the steps toward the car. “We’ve got time before dinner if you want to make your call, but would you mind driving yourself? You could drop me off at the room and I could put my feet up. I’m bushed. Driving that thing takes it out of you! If I ever get one I’ll make sure it has automatic transmission.”

“If you do, all your fellow Lamborghini owners will ostracize you.”

“Oh, that really worries me.” She handed over the keys. “Drive slow, will you? I don’t think I was supposed to take the thing on dirt roads at all. And this isn’t the Amalfi Coast.”

Life’s little ironies, Alix thought after she’d dropped Chris off. She finally gets another chance to get behind the wheel of one of these beauties, and it’s on a burro trail on which she wouldn’t dare drive faster than fifteen miles an hour even without Chris’s warning. Not that it wasn’t a pleasure anyway, she thought, moving the chrome gearshift lever smoothly from first to second. There were six gears on the LP 560, and Chris had never gone higher than fourth. Alix itched to drive all the way to the highway and give all six a workout just for the hell of it, but that didn’t seem right, not without getting Chris’s okay.

She pulled up at the faux log cabin and sat looking at it for a few moments. The set-builders had done a terrific job. Even from a few yards away there was nothing to suggest that it was anything but a moldering, rough-hewn old homestead from pioneer days. When she opened the door to have a peek inside, however, there wasn’t any inside. That is, there was a three-foot-wide platform on the other side of the door—just enough to let them film somebody going in or coming out—and then a two-foot drop-off to rocky, sandy desert soil. No floor at all. Hollywood magic in action.

She went back outside to a shady corner of the splintery porch, sat carefully down on the edge, and dialed Geoff’s business number.

“Venezia Trading Company. Can I help you?” Slow, dense, unmistakable. Apparently, Tiny now served as Venezia’s telephone receptionist.

“Hi, Tiny, this is—”

“Hey,
la mia nipotina
!” he exclaimed happily.
My little niece.

“Yes, it’s me again,
Zio Beniamino
.” Uncle Beniamino. Well, what the hell.

“You wanna talk to your father? I’ll—”

“No, wait a minute, Tiny, it’s you I’m actually calling. I’ll talk with him later.”

That pleased him. “About that O’Keeffe?” he said with interest. She could hear a leather chair groan in protest as he settled his great bulk into it.

“Yes, I’d really appreciate your opinion on a couple of things.” It was true, too. Making up questions hadn’t been necessary after all.

“Okay, shoot.”

“Well, the thing is, I’m working with this woman who’s thinking about buying it, but I have my doubts, very strong doubts, that it’s authentic. That is, I’m almost certain it’s not—there’s something missing, something that ought to be there but isn’t, only I can’t quite put my finger on it, if you know what I mean. It’s as if—”

“I know what you mean. This is what, one of them flower pictures?”

“No, it’s a landscape.”

“Yeah? That’s interesting.” She smiled, remembering that she’d always liked the way Tiny said “interesting.” He was the only person she knew who gave it its full four syllables, equally stressed:
in-ter-est-ing
. Somehow it made whatever they were talking about sound more…in-ter-est-ing. “Mostly they fake the flower pictures. Beats the hell out of me why; the landscapes are a whole lot easier. I guess it’s because most of the marks—excuse me, the potential, you know, customers—are, like, more familiar with the flowers.”

“You’re probably right. But as to this one—”

“You got a picture you could e-mail me?”

“Yes, I do. Shall I do that?”

“Yeah, but for now just go ahead and tell me what it’s like. You know, describe it.”

“It’s a landscape, as I said, a desert scene, a cliff face—”

“Uh-huh.”

“—very painterly, almost abstract. The horizontal striations in the rock are shown mostly in oranges and yellows, with some ochres thrown in—”

“Uh-huh.”

“There are a couple of vertical clefts—cracks—running down the face—”

“Uh-huh”

“—and at the bottom of one of the clefts, in the shadows, you can barely make out the figure of a man—”

“It’s a fake.”

“—in profile, apparently looking off to the right…
What did you say
?”

“It’s a fake.”

“How…wh…?” But even as the question tried to form itself in her mind, the answer was there, waiting for her where it had been all along. “The figure!” she breathed into the phone.

The
figure
, of course, the figure! She’d had it backward: the problem wasn’t that there was something
missing
from the painting, some subtle touch that should have been there and wasn’t. It was the opposite: something that shouldn’t have been there but
was
. And not very subtle, either.

“She didn’t put people in her paintings, did she?” she said more calmly.

“Not a one. Never.”

“Tiny, are you positive? Not a single one?”

“What kinda question is that? Sure I’m sure. Damn thing’s a fake. Okay, you got anything else you need to ask me?” More squeaks as he got out of the chair. “Something else I can do for you?”

“No,” she said, laughing, “that takes care of everything quite nicely at present, thank you.”

“Okay—for Christ’s sake, Geoff, quit pullin’ on my elbow—I mean, I’m still—”

There were some scuffling sounds, presumably Geoff wrenching the phone away from Tiny, and then her father’s merry voice came on. “Hello, my dear. I gather our resident O’Keeffe authority has been of some use?”

“He sure has, Geoff. I should have spotted the problem myself, but I didn’t. The painting has this figure of a man—”

“O’Keeffe didn’t have figures in her paintings.”

She almost sighed, but laughed instead. “That’s the point, all right. I knew something was wrong, but it took Tiny to give me something I could put my finger on. I should have talked to him about it before.” She hesitated, then added softly: “Or to you. I was stupid.”

“Nonsense. Putting one’s finger on it, as you choose to call it, is merely the final step, the icing on the cake. Pah, anyone can do that, given enough time. But recognizing it as inauthentic in the first place, ah, that’s the important thing, that’s what separates you from the rabble of so-called, self-proclaimed experts. And in that regard,” he said with transparent pride, “you came through with flying colors—thanks to the genes you inherited from me, may I modestly point out.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” She leaned against a wooden post, feeling strangely good, not certain whether she was basking in the warmth of the afternoon sun or of her father’s approval. “I hereby thank you for passing them along.”

“And you’re in O’Keeffe country now?” he asked.

“Yes, I am, and it’s glorious. Golden sunshine, mesas, buttes, every color of the rainbow…”

“I envy you. Would you like to guess what it’s doing in Seattle?”

“Raining?”

“Correct. And how long will you be staying?” After so many years of estrangement, she thought, he was finally making small talk, pleasant everyday talk, with his daughter and he was reluctant to see it end.

So was she. “Just today. I’m with Chris, and we’ll be leaving for Taos tomorrow morning sometime—although, come to think of it, she might want to go straight back to Santa Fe instead, once she hears for sure that the painting’s not genuine.” She paused, frowning. “You know,” she said slowly, “there is one angle to this that still troubles me a little.”

“Oh, yes?”
Here I am, ready and eager to help
, he was saying.

“Well, the thing is, this painting was shown during O’Keeffe’s lifetime—in 1971—in what was a prominent gallery, right here in New Mexico. Now, recluse or not, she kept a very sharp eye on her works—especially on one like this, which she was supposed to have given as a gift. Wouldn’t you think she’d have declared it not to be hers at the time?”

“Yes, I would, but how do you know it was shown?”

“Because I saw the exhibition catalog myself.”

“What do you mean, you saw it?”

“I mean I
saw
it. It exists. I spent an hour over it this morning.”

Geoff laughed happily. “Oh, I’d hardly call that confirmatory.”

“What do you mean?”

“My dear child, did it not cross your mind that catalogs can be forged as easily as paintings? Far more easily, I should say.”

That stopped Alix cold. No, the truth was, it hadn’t occurred to her. A fake
catalog
? “But Geoff, I didn’t see this in some sleazy gallery—or even some fancy gallery—this was in the archives, the locked archives, of the Southwest Museum of Twentieth-Century American Art.”

“Oh, I
see
,” he said archly. “Your point being that anything residing in an art museum must therefore be authentic. By definition, as it were.”

“Well, no, of course not, but look, there were a good forty pages in it, each devoted to its own painting, all with photos, and provenances, and technical specs. Are you suggesting they were all fakes?”

“Not necessarily. Just the one you were looking for.”

“What? But how could—”

“Did it not occur to you that, while the catalog as a whole may well have been authentic—very likely
was
authentic—the particular page on which this particular painting appeared might not have been?”

“What?” she said again, weakly. “I don’t understand. It was the exact same painting I saw. I was looking at it just this morning. The measurements were exactly the same, the—”

“Of course they were the same. That’s because your painting would have been painted first. Then it was photographed. Then it was measured. And only
then
would the false page have been prepared with
that
photo,
those
measurements, an invented provenance of some sort, and a few descriptive remarks. After that, all that remained, and this would have been the only ticklish part, would have been to somehow gain access to the archives, remove a preselected page from the preselected legitimate catalog, and replace it with the altered one.”

“But Geoff, the catalog pages have page numbers on them, and they’re all formatted the same way, with the same size pictures and the same fonts and all. A new page would stand out, it would be different, and this one wasn’t.”

“Ah, but you see, that’s where the preselection would have come in. The process requires two visits to the archives, the first to choose and surreptitiously photograph a page in the catalog—both sides of the page, of course, or all four sides if it’s folded in quarto. That way, the scoundrels would be able to reproduce the pagination, the formatting, the material on the reverse side, on the attached page or pages, and so forth. The second visit would be to remove it and substitute the altered page for it—the page with the ‘newly discovered’ painting on it. A simple process, really, but clever, wouldn’t you say? After all, one might foresee a dodge of some sort involving things being taken
from
a museum. But things being put
into
one? Hardly likely to be anticipated.”

She absorbed this for a few seconds. It was no wonder that archivists like Clyde Moody were so vigilant and so protective of their catalogs if they had to worry about people sneaking in to “alter” them. Though how on earth could such a thing have been accomplished under Moody’s eagle eye? Very clever indeed.

“You sound as if you’re pretty familiar with this ‘process,’ Geoff,” she said wryly.

“I’ve heard talk of it,” was his bland response.

“All the same, I have to say it sounds pretty improbable to me. Too complicated.”

“If it weren’t improbable, it wouldn’t be very likely to succeed, would it? Now then. Let me make a few guesses: the gallery is no longer in existence.”

“That’s true.”

“The seller was anonymous.”

“Well, yes.”

“The provenance is, shall we say, on the scant side.”

“Yes, that’s certainly true, too.”

“The gallery owner has either shuffled off this mortal coil or is otherwise unreachable for verification.”

“Well…”

“And given all that,” he asked gently, “you didn’t think to perform at least a cursory examination of the page? Did it have a watermark? If so, did the watermark differ from the rest of the pages? What about the gloss, the penetration of the inks? The—”

“No, Geoff, I did not think of any of that,” she said, exasperated. “Strangely enough, although I may be Geoffrey London’s daughter, my mind runs toward establishing authenticity, not fakery. Clearly, I am sadly unschooled in the intricacies of the forger’s trade.”

He took this, as usual, in good, even high spirits. “How unkind of you,” he said with that damnably appealing chuckle, “to throw my failure as a father in my face.”

She stiffened. Was
that
what he saw as his failure as a father? In her opinion, he had a few more serious ones than that. He was joking, but he was treading on dangerous ground here all the same.

Still, he was such a charming old bastard that she couldn’t help laughing. “Well, look, none of it matters anyway. At this point we know the painting is a fake. So as soon as I’ve told Chris, which will be a few minutes from now, I will have completed my job.”

“Your job, yes, but aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know for
certain
about the catalog?”

“Sure I am. When I get back to Santa Fe, I’ll see if I can make some time to get over to the museum again and check it out.”

“There’s more than your curiosity at stake, you know,” he said with a touch of severity. “Don’t you feel a moral responsibility to inform the museum of this?”