A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (2 page)

"Well, I told him you'd go on out to his warehouse to look at them."

I laughed. "Are we making house calls now?"

"Look, you can't blame him for not wanting to drive them around in his car. And the guy's a steady patron of the museum, good for twenty thousand a year. I really think you ought to go. I don't suppose you could do it now?"

"No car," I said. I was living in an apartment in Winslow, across the Sound. I took the ferry to the city every morning and walked to work.

"I'll drive you. I'll even spring for dinner when we're done. We could be at Mike's warehouse by about 6:10, and I could have you back for the—" He consulted his watch and pressed some tiny buttons on it. "—for the—mm . . ."

When Calvin consults his watch, it is always something of a production. Calvin is the only person I know who actually sends away for those items you see advertised in airline magazines, and that's where his watch came from; a rectangular, sinister, dull-black thing with two faces. A navigator watch, he once explained to me, outfitted with chronograph, dual LCD display, luminous analog dial, and ratcheted safety bezel. Plus more buttons than I have on my stereo system.

"—for the 9:50 ferry!" he said triumphantly. "How's that?"

I nodded. It sounded better than the Meissen. And I certainly didn't have anything else waiting for me that evening, at my apartment or anywhere else. The fact is, I hadn't made the world's greatest adjustment to bachelorhood after ten years of marriage. I guess I hadn't made the greatest adjustment to marriage either, or I wouldn't be divorced.

I locked up the office and we walked to the covered garage at the Four Seasons, where Calvin insisted on parking his car. The rest of the staff parked in the slots behind the museum. Calvin was the sort of person you'd expect to drive a Porsche, and he did, although he claimed with a straight face that it was for reasons of economy. He had owned four, he said, and had sold each of the previous three for more than he'd paid for it. We pulled out onto Fifth Avenue, slowly made our way through the sluggish traffic to Madison, and turned right to jerk and grind our way down the steep incline to Alaskan Way.

"God," Calvin said, "this traffic gets worse every day. It's all you goddam newcomers. It's really hard on my Porsche." To Calvin, it was never his car or his automobile. Only his Porsche.

"I'm from San Francisco," I said. "This seems like a Sunday drive in the country to me. Calvin, what did you mean, this guy imports old paintings from Italy? That's illegal. You can't get an old painting out of Italy without special government permission."

"Well, they're not really old. They're just doctored to look old. He runs a firm called Venezia and he imports bushels of them. The Italian government doesn't give a damn about them."

I looked at him in amazement. "He imports
forgeries
?"

"No, high-class fakes that are baked in an oven or whatever they do to make them look old. They're only forgeries if you try to pass them off as the real thing, right? As long as you label something a copy, it's perfectly legal."

True, but nobody in the legitimate art world is made any happier by knowing that bushels of high-class Old Master copies are floating around. Paintings change hands often and unexpectedly, and what is sold as a replica today has a funny way of turning up on the auction block next year as an original.

"What does he do with bushels of fakes?" I asked.

"He calls them 'authenticated simulated masterpieces,' and he sells them to motels and restaurants who want something classy on the wall for three hundred bucks or under. He also supplies fake antique ashtrays, lamps, mirrors, that kind of thing. From what I understand, he's the main supplier on the West Coast."

"And you can make enough from that to give $20,000 a year to the museum?"

"Are you kidding?" Calvin said with a laugh. "Jeez, Chris, you don't know beans about business, do you?"

I suppose I don't. I'm frequently amazed by the profitability of businesses I didn't even know existed. Who would have thought there was a lucrative market for fake antique ashtrays?

Traffic slowed predictably when we hit the industrial area south of the Kingdome, and we crawled along, avoiding the barriers and piles of broken pavement that mark the city's everlasting waterfront renewal projects. At one point Calvin sneered audibly, and I looked up, startled, but quickly realized it was merely an instinctive comment as we passed the Hyundai terminal.

A little beyond the Spokane Street viaduct Calvin turned left, following an arrow on a rather unpromising traffic sign for "vehicles hauling explosives and flammable liquids." We were now behind the Union Pacific yards, in an area of dusty warehouses and plumbing suppliers.

"You said he had two pictures he thinks are originals?" I said.

"Yup, a Rubens—"

I laughed.

He glanced at me. "What's funny about Rubens?"

"Jeez, Calvin, you don't know beans about art, do you?" I said. "In the long history of art forgery, there have probably been more fake Rubenses than anything else. Half the
real
ones are fakes."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Rubens produced a zillion pictures," I explained. "He invented mass production two centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Two hundred assistants in his workshop, with all kinds of specialties; some did skies, some did walls. The advanced ones did textiles or animals."

"What did
he
do?" Calvin asked with a marketing man's transparent approval. "Besides charge for the finished product, I mean."

"It depended. He had a sliding price scale. So much for the ones he painted all by himself, so much for the ones his assistants did some of the work on, so much for the ones he simply approved. Of course, when you have people like Van Dyck and Jordaens in your workshop, your quality isn't going to be too awful."

"I love it. So you're telling me Rubens wasn't one of those poor bastards who died penniless."

"Not by a long shot. Anyhow, nowadays it's next to impossible to prove beyond doubt which is which, since most of them have his signature. I'd say two-thirds of the 'genuine' Rubenses—even the ones in museums—are arguable."

"But that still doesn't make them forgeries, does it? Not technically."

"No, but it makes it awfully easy for other people to fake them. You see, the most convincing Rubens forgery—or any other Old Master forgery—isn't something that was baked in an oven last week. It's . . . I'm not telling you something you already know, am I?"

"No, this is news to me. So what's the most convincing Rubens forgery?"

"A painting by a reasonably competent but unknown artist from Rubens' time and place. There are plenty of them that have been lying around in basements or hanging in little churches somewhere in Europe for three hundred years. The age would be right, the type of pigments, the kind of canvas, the varnish, the frame, even the style—all perfectly valid Flemish Baroque. All that's needed is a fake Rubens signature, and a five-thousand-dollar painting is suddenly worth five hundred thousand, with any luck."

We had pulled to a stop just off First Avenue South. Behind us was a huge shed of corrugated steel with "Pacific Sheet Metaling" painted boldly on it. On the building across the street was a mystifying sign saying BUFFALO SANITARY WIPERS. But the one we'd stopped in front of said nothing at all; just a grimy, plain, brown brick warehouse. No, on second glance there was a faded message on the small steel door next to the rolled-down freight entrance: VENEZIA.

"What's the other painting?" I asked Calvin as we climbed out of the car.

"A portrait by Jan van Eyck."

My eyebrows rose. Van Eyck, often but inaccurately called the inventor of oil painting, lived 200 years before Rembrandt and Vermeer, and his technique was so forbiddingly accomplished that few forgers have had the nerve to palm off their own paintings, or anybody else's, as van Eycks. Why bother, when forging Rubens, or Hals , or El Greco, or Corot is so much easier and brings just as much profit?

The upper half of the steel door swung open as we walked toward it. A cool-eyed black man in an olive uniform with AETNA SECURITY on the sleeve impassively watched us approach.
 
I could see the butt of a holstered pistol on his hip. Michael Blusher was taking his Rubens and van Eyck seriously.

"Can I help you gentlemen?"

"I'm Calvin Boyer and this is Dr. Norgren. We're from the art museum. Mr. Blusher is expecting us."

He nodded and unhooked the lower portion of the door, then carefully barred both sections again once we were inside the dreary little vestibule: no furniture; concrete floor with a worn, narrow carpet runner the original color of which was impossible to tell; nothing on the walls but a couple of flyblown certificates from the building department or the health department, or some such. There was a dank, depressing smell of raw concrete and mold.

"If you gentlemen will follow me." He led us through a door and onto the runner, where it continued along the wall of a cavernous unloading area. The big room was filled with open crates, their contents scattered about the place: not the usual little
Davids
on pedestals, but eighteenth-century gilt inkstands and candelabra, Regency torchères, Sheffield urns. And paintings, perhaps three hundred of them: Titians, Michelangelos, Raphaels, Rembrandts, Watteaus, Fragonards, most of them crackled and darkened and burnished with bogus age. Some of the pieces had a certain slapdash flair to them, but they were far from the first-class fakes I'd been led to expect. I was relieved; nobody with any kind of eye would ever confuse them with the real thing.

We followed the guard up a narrow flight of steps at the end of the corridor.

"Off-duty PD?" Calvin asked him casually.

"You got it."

"Cops call everybody 'gentlemen,' " Calvin explained to me knowledgeably. "I was once in this bar when there was a drug bust. It was great: 'Which of you gentlemen does this little plastic bag of white powder belong to?' `Charlie, will you take this gentleman's gun?' `Does anybody here happen to know the name of this gentleman on the floor that I've just had to subdue?' "

The guard was laughing as he tapped on the door at the top of the stairs. OFFICE had once been on it in press-on letters, but they had long ago fallen or been pulled off, leaving pale outlines on the dingy wood.

"The people from the museum, Mr. Blusher," the guard called.

"Send 'em right in, Ned." The answering voice was loud, robust; well matched by the man it belonged to.

Michael Blusher was a broad-beamed, big-boned man in his early forties. Sturdy as he was, he had the puffy, bloated look of someone who had once weighed a great deal more. He jumped up from a wooden swivel chair and came out from behind his cluttered desk, his hand outstretched. I recognized him now. I had seen him once or twice at preview receptions, but we'd never spoken.

"Thanks for coming, guys," he said, pumping my hand, and then grabbed Calvin's. "Great of you to come, Boyer. Believe me, I'll make my appreciation known the next time I write a check to the museum. And next time I have lunch with Tony, I'll be sure and tell him you two came out on your own time as a special favor to me. You guys are the greatest."

"That's wonderful, Mike," said Calvin, who did not seem to find any of this offensive. "Chris, I'm sure you remember Mike Blusher. He's one of our most eminent patrons of the arts."

Blusher shook my hand again and beamed. Then he turned to Calvin with an expression of mock disappointment.

"Hey, I was hoping you'd bring that li'l gal that sits out front in your office with the skirt split up to the gazoo," said the eminent patron of the arts. "The one with the knockers."

Calvin tipped back his head and laughed appreciatively. This was part of his job and he was good at it; a lot better than I would have been. "Debbie's an eight-to-fiver, Mike. She gets paid time-and-a-half for overtime."

"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.