A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) (2 page)

October 5, 2010, Seattle, Washington

The view from the fourteenth-story condominium in Seattle’s tony Belltown neighborhood was enough to knock anybody’s eye out: Puget Sound sparkling in the thin Northwestern sunlight, toylike green and white ferries gliding by each other on their way to and from Bainbridge Island, the distant Olympics with their glacier-topped peaks.

Alix London, sitting beside the window, was aware of none of this grand spectacle. Her eyes, her complete attention, every fiber of her being, were riveted on a four-inch-square segment of oil-painted canvas depicting the base of a garden wall. This was the one part of the ninety-five-year-old painting that had begun flaking and scaling. With a soft brush, she had just gingerly saturated the area with a mixture of beeswax and damar resin. Now, with infinite care, tongue peeping between her teeth, she was using a warmed palette knife to gently flatten each individual flake and re-adhere it to the canvas.

It was the trickiest part of the entire cleaning and restoring process, and far and away the most nerve-racking. This was, after all, not the usual sort of painting she was employed to work on—some muddy, “school-of” picture picked up at an “antiques” store under the Alaskan Way viaduct—but a well-documented painting from the White Period of the half-mad, alcoholic Impressionist painter Maurice Utrillo. Alix knew for a fact that Katryn, the condo’s owner, had paid $185,000 for it at a Christie’s auction.

With sweat running down her temples, she pressed the last tiny flake into place and let out a pent-up breath. Removing the strapped-on binocular magnifiers, she blinked a few times to clear the perspiration from her eyes and had a good look.

Perfect. Beautiful. Whew. She sat back, much relieved. The rest, compared to this, was going to be a snap. She had only to—

The telephone beside her burred. She picked it up, still studying the rustic village scene. “Hello?”

“Good morning, my dear,” a sunny, English-accented voice purred, “a very good day to you. You’re well, I hope?”

“I’m fine, Geoff,” she said curtly. Pointedly, she did not inquire as to whether or not he was also well.

But he was used to this kind of reception from his daughter, and, as usual, he barreled right through it. “The latest issue of
Art News
should have been in the mail today. I was wondering if you’d yet had a chance to read it.”

“No, Geoff, not yet.” Why she couldn’t bring herself to tell her father that she couldn’t afford a subscription to
Art News
at $39.95 a year—not when she could walk over to the Seattle Art Museum’s library and read it for free—was an ongoing mystery to her. Particularly inasmuch as her financial straits were the direct result of his screwing up her life so spectacularly.

“Well, prepare yourself for a shock, my dear. They didn’t put me in the show—now what do you think of that?”

“The show?” Her mind was still on the Utrillo.

“Moreover, in my opinion, it was by no means an oversight. Helen excluded me on purpose. She never did care for me, you know.” She heard the slightest of chuckles. “I can’t think why.”

“Uh…Helen?”

“Helen Hall-Duncan? Senior curator at the Bruce Museum? Greenwich, Connecticut?”

“Ummm…”

“Hello? Is anybody home there?”

“Sorry, Geoff. I was thinking about something else.”

“The Bruce Museum,” he repeated patiently. “We went there, you and I, when you were a nipper of nine. I took you to a charming show full of doggie paintings. You loved it. You remember.”

No, she didn’t remember, but then, Geoffrey London had dragged his little girl to so many museums that they were a blur. “Sort of,” she said. She considered telling him she was busy and hanging up, but now she was curious. “So what did this Hall-Duncan do that ticked you off so much?”

“‘Ticked off’? I? Not at all. I merely express righteous indignation—to which I am most assuredly entitled, as you will soon agree. You do recall that they have opened a new exhibit—
Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception
?”

She did remember that he’d mentioned something about it a week or so before. “Uh-huh. And the problem is?” No, damn it, she realized, she’d missed one little flake of paint—no, an incipient flake. More of tiny blister, really, but it had to be dealt with before it did flake off. She was reluctant to flood the spot with any more of the resin solution, but maybe if she just re-warmed the knife—

“The problem
is
,” he said, “they have none of my work! Nothing! I am not even mentioned. Can you believe it? My Constables were every bit as good as Keating’s, were they not? My Rouaults were far better than Hebborn’s. Yet their work is generously displayed, and I—I am not even
mentioned
? It’s outrageous, positively criminal.”

Alix closed her eyes and took a deep breath. How many people in this world, she wondered, had fathers who went around grousing—Geoff London had a twinkly, jovial way of doing it, but it was still grousing—because they didn’t get their due respect as world-class forgers? And how in the world could he have retained all of his old verve after what had happened to him?

She shook her head, remembering how she’d assumed that, having been convicted of forgery, theft, and interstate fraud, he would emerge from his eight-year prison term a broken man, a shriveled shell of his former self. He had, after all, been a much-respected conservator and restorer on the New York art scene—for four years a senior curator at the Met, no less—and much in demand socially. His delightfully silky, English-accented voice, his sparkling, kindly brown eyes, his ruddy charm (an article in
The New Yorker
had once referred to him as “cuddly,” one of the few times she’d seen him express real irritation), and his obvious pleasure in socializing had made him a sought-after guest at the cocktail parties, salons, and soirées of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

But when he got out of prison, or so she’d thought, he’d be just one more ex-con. He’d still be in demand, all right, but it would be by an army of wronged, extremely peeved art collectors with lawsuits under their arms.

“Do you want to know what I think is behind it?” Geoff was still at it. “It’s simple, unadorned spite, no more, no less. Petty jealousy—”

She shook her head and sighed. Clearly, she’d underestimated him. Now, almost a year out of the federal medium-security facility at Lompoc, California, lawsuits settled, he’d apparently had the same idea she’d had about a new life out West and—was he trying to ruin her life again?—had shown up in Seattle himself, where he had used what little money he had left to buy a failing trading company somewhere in the city’s grimy, freeway-slashed industrial section. Venezia, its name was, and it specialized in supplying hotels and restaurants with schlock-art imports, or so he said. What exactly he did there she didn’t know and she didn’t want to know, but it didn’t strike her as a good sign that his employees all seemed to be old pals from his art-forging days. Ex-cons, mostly, just like him, although few ex-cons could manage Geoff London’s effervescent, unfailingly upbeat personality and—she had to admit it—his essential likability.

“Yeah, well, you did annoy quite a few people in the art world, you know.”

“Didn’t I, though,” he said quietly, and she knew he had that puckish, irresistible, inarguably charming smile on his face. She smiled herself, imagining it, and for a moment she wished she could see it in person. She had loved her father, loved him dearly. But now…

Time to change the subject. “Speaking of the art world,” she said, unable to stop herself from showing off a little for him, “I have a meeting with a collector tonight. At a donor’s reception at the museum. If all goes well, this could be the entrée I’ve been hoping for.”

“Oh, yes? More cleaning, is it?” He had never put it in so many words, but she knew that he thought the cleaning of paintings was beneath her abilities.

“No, not cleaning. Advising. Consulting. She wants some help—some expert advice on a purchase—and somewhere or other she’s heard that I’m the one for the job.”

“Well, it’s about time people started recognizing your eye,” he said with fatherly pride. “You’re a natural, my dear. I like to flatter myself by thinking it’s in the genes.”

He just might be right about that, she thought. She’d been living and breathing art as long as she could remember. As a teenager, she’d spent many an enchanted after-school hour (before she’d discovered boys) in the workrooms of the Met watching and eagerly learning from her father. That much, at any rate, she owed him.

“And what does this mysterious collector of yours collect?” he asked. “Not more Victorian shaving mugs, I trust.”

That was as close to sarcasm as he ever came. He was referring to her previous consulting job. Little did he know that Victorian shaving mugs were a step up from the one before, which she’d gone out of her way not to mention to him. She’d been advising a client on aquarium furniture, the little ceramic knickknacks—overflowing treasure chests, and deep-sea divers that bubbled, and mermaids—that people put in their aquariums. Who knew there was even a name for them? Or that people actually collected them? She’d taken it on mainly because the client was a high-level Microsoft executive, and she was hopeful that he’d give her referrals to other dot-comers for something a little more along her line. She’d done a good job for him too, spending hours on the Internet and in libraries to get up to speed on the subject, although now she wondered how many of her valuable brain cells were filled up with the junk.

“No. Not quite,” she said with a certain amount of pride of her own. “It’s Georgia O’Keeffe she’s interested in.”

Indeed, he was impressed. “Oh, I say. Now there’s an artist one can get one’s teeth into. You’ll tell me if you can use any help, won’t you? Tiny is very much an O’Keeffe expert. He might well be able to give you a few words of advice.”

Tiny (six-four, three-hundred-plus pounds) was one of Geoff’s ex-con employees and almost as charming, in his own slow, good-natured way, as Geoff. He could have been a superb mixed-media artist—watercolors and pastels—in his own right. Unfortunately, he had liked creating Homers and Whistlers more. Which was why he was now an ex-con. When Alix had been a child he had been her “Uncle Beniamino,” and although not really a relative, he had been the favorite by far of all her “uncles.” But a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then, and she was no longer a child.

“Thanks, Geoff, I’ll keep him in mind. I’ve got to go now. Still need to do a little more work on this Utrillo.”

“Utrillo, is it? Do you know, I remember knocking off a Utrillo in a day and a half that was as good as anything Utrillo ever did—better, if we’re going to be honest. I could do an O’Keeffe too, when you come right down to it. Perhaps not in a day and a half, but give me the subject, and of course the period, and—”

“Bye, Geoff.”

What to wear for the reception.

She chose the timeless, elegantly simple, basic black skirt-suit from Prada, with a slender chain-link necklace to set it off; the Givenchy lapelled jacket with its ivory-and-black floral jacquard weave and its subtly padded shoulders; and the gleaming Salvatore Ferragamo three-inch black slingbacks to add a little pizzazz. The perfect getup for an occasion that was part business meeting, part glitzy cocktail reception.

Picking the outfit had taken all of two minutes. It was, in fact, the
only
outfit she had for part-business-part-glitzy-cocktail receptions. Or for business meetings in general. Or for cocktail receptions, glitzy or otherwise. Or for just about anything else that involved being seen in public. Alix’s wardrobe might’ve been classic, but extensive it was not. It wasn’t new either. Almost everything in it was from consignment sales at Le Frock Vintage Clothing, the secondhand shop in Capitol Hill’s lowrent zone, practically under the I-5 freeway.

There had been a time, she thought dreamily, when her clothes had come straight from the designer showrooms. How long ago it seemed now, almost as if it had been someone else’s life. How easily it had all come to her, how much she took it simply as her due to grow up on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, to have a family box at the Metropolitan Opera, to spend the family summers in Rhode Island’s elite and exclusive beach community of Watch Hill (“straight out of
The Great Gatsby
,” her father liked to say, to the extreme annoyance of Alix’s mother), to move effortlessly among the rich and the influential. But all that had come to a crashing end with Geoff’s indictment. The family money had vanished down the bottomless rat hole of lawyer’s fees and settlements, quickly becoming a distant memory. What a rude shock that had been. The only bright spot, if you could call it that, was that her mother’s death two years earlier had spared her the scandal.

Alix had been in her senior year at Harvard at the time, and although the sixty thousand dollars left in her college fund had been untouched by the lawyers, she’d dropped out anyway and arranged to have the money, every cent of it, put aside for Geoff, the only provision being that he was not to know who or where it was from. (His gratitude was not something she wanted weighing her down.) Instead, he was to be told it was the residue of his one-time assets. Quitting school had hurt, but he was still her father, and he would be almost seventy by the time he got out of Lompoc, disgraced and impoverished. The sixty thousand and its interest would at least give him something to help him last out his remaining years. It had, too; he’d used it to jump-start his new business.