Brush With Death (6 page)

“As eef I would 'ave anyzing to do wiz such vile reproductions! I
speet
on 'im. I will
not
be associated wiz zat contemptible
poseur
!
Jamais!
”

“Georges, think about this, please,” I said, my stomach clenching. “If you deny you painted the ones by Hart, you're as good as admitting you forged the others.”

“But 'ow can I keep silent? 'E is challenging my genius!”

“Just let it roll off you.”

“Roll off me?”

“Sure, you know—like water off a duck's back.”

“You are suggesting I be a duck? A
duck
?
Quel canard!
”

“I'm
suggesting
you stay out of prison, old man.” For several seconds I heard nothing but faint static. “Georges? Are you there?”

“This Spumoni authenticator is as good as you are,
chérie.
” Grandfather's voice was low, his accent slipped, and I realized we'd gotten to the purpose of his call. “He appears to know me.”

That gave me pause. Few realized what a challenge it was for even expert authenticators to tell a genuine painting from a top-notch forgery. As long as a skilled forger used an aged canvas and paints chemically indistinguishable from those of the original painting, science was of limited assistance. Often the final judgment came down to intuition, the almost magical ability to appreciate an artist's unique style. I had been born with a rare gift for what Georges called “aesthetic profiling” and Interpol called “fake busting,” and my ability had been honed by a lifetime of study. If Doughnut Spumoni had a similar talent, my grandfather could be in serious trouble.

One of the ironies of the art forgery business was that, by definition, the best forgers were anonymous. Anyone with a paintbrush could paint a lousy fake; only an elite few had the talent and training to paint a convincing one. The professional fake buster's secret weapon was the skilled forger's understandable desire to have his or her artistry recognized and admired. A peculiar relationship thus tended to spring up between forger and fake buster: the latter was among the few to truly “get” the forger's skill, yet was dedicated to exposing it. Doughnut Spumoni—or whatever his name really was—might be my grandfather's biggest fan, but he would stop at nothing to out Georges. For an artist like my grandfather, being unable to paint was tantamount to being unable to breathe.

“Listen, Grandfather,” I said. “Why don't you let me look into this? In the meantime, promise me you'll keep your mouth shut and stay underground for a week or two.”

I heard some halfhearted sputtering. Georges was in his seventies but saw himself as a much younger man. He did not easily ask for, nor accept, my help.

“
Bon.
I thought you might have contacts in the legitimate art world. It is good you live such an artless life,
non
?”

Fat lot he knew.

The next morning I stood before the columbarium's
La Fornarina
and realized that Cindy Tanaka was right. The painting was not what it seemed.

It wasn't, as I had feared after last night's phone call, one of my grandfather's forgeries. Nor was it a genuine Raphael. But it also wasn't what the brass tag affixed to the frame claimed: A COPY OF RAFFAELO'S
LA FORNARINA,
1871, BY CRISPIN ENGELS. The “painting” before me was instead a computer-generated copy, available over the Internet for $179.99 plus shipping. I hated these cheap digital reproductions with the kind of visceral passion I reserved for imminent threats to my livelihood.

But why would Cindy imagine it to be genuine? For that matter, why would a computer-generated knockoff be labeled a nineteenth-century reproduction?

Intrigued, I retraced my steps from the dead-end Alcove of the Allegories through apse after apse to the Hall of the Cherubim, passed through the Corridor of Saints, and headed toward the main office, where I found the columbarium's director, Roy Cogswell, signing some papers at the reception desk.

“Annie.” He greeted me politely and glanced at his watch. “What are you doing here so early?”

Blue-eyed and sandy-haired, with the gangly physique of an aging basketball player, Roy Cogswell was not the type one expected to find running a funerary business. Still, his somber, almost somnambulant way of speaking, his habit of folding his hands in front of him, and his measured response to any comment suggested the impact of three decades spent in the service of the bereaved. Apparently, one learned not to make any sudden moves around the grief-stricken.

“I stopped by to take a look at something. Do you have a minute?”

“I'm afraid I don't,” he said. “I have a meeting. Boring financial matters. Speaking of which, how goes the assessment of our miniatures collection?”

“So far it's not too encouraging, but I'm still working on it,” I hedged. My friend Samantha's former assistant, Rachel, worked in appraisals at Mayfield's Auction House, and I'd shown her the miniatures collection last week. According to Rachel, the collection was historically interesting but not very valuable, in part because of the portraits' diminutive size and primitive style but mostly because in art, as in so much of life, market value was relative to desire. There just wasn't a demand for miniatures these days.

These appealing “likenesses in little”—some by artists whom I recognized, such as John Singleton Copley and Charles Wilson Peale—had been popular in the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before the invention of photography by Louis Daguerre, a former painter, miniature portraits were the cheapest and easiest way to capture a loved one's image. The tradition had been brought to the American colonies from England and Italy, where Rosalba Carriera had pioneered the technique of crosshatching or stippling watercolors or gouache on ivory, rather than on less durable vellum. At that time, miniature painting was one of the few arenas in which women artists competed successfully with men.

Just a few inches tall, the ovals were small enough to slip in a pocket, and were sometimes set into lockets to be kept near the wearer's heart, or framed in cases of fine leather, worked gold, or etched silver. Locks of the subject's hair, braided or arranged in a “plaid” pattern, were often fixed beneath a thin layer of glass on the back of the portrait. To me the most intriguing aspect of the miniatures was their personal significance. The portraits were treasured remembrances of cherished husbands gone off to war, perhaps never to return; of dewy brides destined to die young in childbirth; of beloved children who fell victim to any of a thousand terrors, including what we today airily dismiss as “childhood diseases”; of revered mothers and fathers—in short, they were reminders of loved ones whose visages would otherwise live on only in the fading memories of those who survived, or glimpsed in the faces of their descendants.

Rachel had estimated the columbarium's collection would sell for perhaps five hundred to a few thousand dollars apiece. Not exactly the windfall the columbarium needed to pay for its long-overdue earthquake retrofit.

One other possibility, Rachel suggested, was that full-sized early American portraits often showed women wearing a miniature. If we could match the columbarium's miniatures with such paintings their value would skyrocket. To determine this would require extensive research, and Rachel would do only so much without being paid. I wasn't much good at research. Or computers. Not to mention I had a million other things on my To Do list.

But something about Chapel of the Chimes tugged at my heart. It was unique, a testament to turn-of-the-century Oakland's wealth and ambition to be taken seriously as a cultural center. Architect Julia Morgan's mosaic-encrusted Gothic design was stunning, and even the newer section, whose crisp lines and soaring heights harkened more to Frank Lloyd Wright, was soothing and reflective. As final resting places went, the columbarium was a gem.

“Well, keep me posted,” Cogswell continued. A spark lit up his blue eyes. “Or perhaps I might drop by later. Are you and Mary painting tonight?”

“It might be more convenient if I swing by your office tomorrow morning,” I replied. Mary would not be able to conceal her impatience with the columbarium's smitten director, and I feared the diffident Roy would be slow to recover from her sharp tongue.

Roy nodded and shuffled into a small conference room, where I glimpsed the columbarium's accountant, Manny Ramirez, chatting with two gray-suited men.

“I'll be surprised if we're open past June,” a dour woman announced in clipped tones as she stared at me over the rims of her rhinestone reading glasses. Roy Cogswell's intimidating administrative assistant, known to all and sundry as “Miss Ivy,” liked nothing better than to ambush anyone foolish enough to pause on their way past the redwood counter and subject them to lengthy doomsday monologues. The employees referred to this as “Miss Ivy's office arrest.” I used to think it was funny.

“Mmm,” I responded, trying not to encourage her.

“Building's falling down about our heads as it is,” she continued, smoothing her leopard-print miniskirt over her thin thighs. Miss Ivy was fifteen years my senior, worked in a mortuary, and never cracked a smile, but she dressed like a Las Vegas hooker on her day off. It was disconcerting, to say the least. “I'm sure you've seen the state of the glass ceiling tiles. Been that way since the eighty-nine earthquake. Can't afford to fix 'em. Mark my words, it's only a matter of time until they close this place down. If you could see what I've seen—”

“Is the situation really that dire?” I interrupted. “I would think there's no shortage of demand.”

“Oh, sure, people die every
day,
” she said, as if announcing late-breaking news. “But what with those so-called environmentalists kicking up a fuss about the smoke from the crematorium, and advocating those ‘green burials' that don't even use caskets, no better than the heathen Hottentots, well, I ask you, how are we supposed to turn a profit? Now, it seems to me—”

“Miss Ivy, do you know anything about the columbarium's artwork?”

“Do I
look
like a tour guide?”

“No, but I thought you might—”

“I'll tell you one thing, the management would do well to focus less on aesthetics and more on the day-to-day operations of—”

“Such a shame.
Such
a shame,” I babbled, backing out the door. “I think I'm coming down with something. Must be that plague that's going around. Gotta go!”

I beat a retreat and ran to my truck, looking askance at the sky. An unseasonable drizzle had started to fall. It wasn't supposed to rain after early April in this part of California. That was part of the deal: we paid exorbitant rents and lived with overcrowded freeways in exchange for sunny, beautiful weather almost year-round.

Motoring down Piedmont Avenue, I doubled back through a complicated maze to reach the hidden on-ramp to 580. Oakland had numerous freeway exits but only a handful of poorly marked entrances. Normally during off-hours I could whiz from Oakland to San Francisco in under fifteen minutes, but not today. Screeching to a halt half a mile from the toll plaza, I switched on Alice's morning show for a traffic update.

I tried to catch a glimpse of what promised to be an entertaining sight, but saw only a sea of red taillights. At least a free-ranging ostrich was more benign than the time last fall when a flatbed truck transporting brimming Port-o-Potties tipped over, closing the Bay Bridge until spacesuit-clad Haz Mat workers cleaned things up. For weeks afterward, I'd sworn the bridge smelled funky.

Armed with a commuter mug of Peet's French Roast coffee and three crumpled dollar bills for the toll, I watched the rain and used the delay to think. Had Michael absconded with the columbarium's nineteenth-century copy and hung the mass-produced version in its place? A good hundred-plus-year-old copy might be worth several thousand dollars, a great one tens of thousands. But it seemed out of character for him. Art theft was a business for Michael, which was why from time to time he teamed up with my grandfather for high-risk but highly lucrative forgery-and-switch schemes. Michael was unlikely to consider a Crispin Engels worth stealing. On the other hand, the columbarium's pitiful security system meant the downside of theft—arrest—was negligible. Still, Michael had a genuine love of art; it was hard to imagine him unleashing $179.99 digital prints upon the world.

I checked my cell phone for the umpteenth time, closed my eyes, and sent Cindy Tanaka telepathic messages to call me. What did she know about
La Fornarina
—or rather, what did she think she knew? It was one thing for an untrained eye to be fooled by a nineteenth-century copy, which would look genuinely old; quite another to assume an obvious digital reproduction might be real. Still, it was hard to imagine her making up the tale out of whole cloth. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know who had sent her—and by extension, me—on such a wild-goose chase, and why.

I also wondered how the cemetery personnel had responded when Cindy told them about last night's break-in at Louis Spencer's crypt. Who would rob a crypt—while dressed as a ghoul, no less? What was in that metal box? I had hoped to ask Roy Cogswell about the break-in, but he might not have heard anything, anyway. The cemetery and the columbarium were owned by the same corporation, but had separate management.