Priceless (33 page)

“Oh my God,” said Serena as she finally laid eyes on the painting he expected her to copy. It was Ricasoli’s painting of the Virgin Mary in a moment of contemplation before the Annunciation. Property of the Wasowski family of Warsaw. Looted by the Nazis in 1944 and hidden away, until now.

Carefully, reverently, Yasha laid the painting out on the table. Serena, with her hand at her throat as though to stifle a gasp, kept her distance from it as she took her first look.

“It can’t be real.”

“Of course it’s real,” said Yasha.

Serena made a silent inventory of the details. The picture was so familiar. She had first set eyes on the composition as a child, seeing it in the pages of an encyclopedia. She had fallen in love with this depiction that brought the Virgin Mary to life in a way that only a young girl could really appreciate. She looked so carefree, sitting by an open window with a ripe black fig in her hand. And so beautiful. Her golden hair swept back from a high forehead. Her nose was straight and elegant. Her lips were full and seemed always to be on the verge of a smile.

Never had Serena expected to see the original. When once she expressed a desire to see it, her father had broken the news to her that its whereabouts were unknown. The encyclopedia that attributed the painting to the Wasowski family collection was woefully out of date.
The Virgin
had been stolen before Serena was even born.

“It has a little swastika on the back,” Yasha confirmed.

“I can’t believe it,” Serena murmured.

“It’s okay,” said Yasha. “It won’t disintegrate if you breathe on it! Step forward. Have a proper look. You’re going to need to know it inside out.”

“It’s …” Serena struggled to find the words. “It’s just so beautiful!”

“It is,” said Yasha.

Serena took a tentative step forward and gazed at the picture. “I’m going to ask the obvious question.”

“And I can’t tell you the answer,” said Yasha. “So please don’t ask.”

“I understand.” For the moment, Serena was content just to look at this painting, which had been lost for more than half a century. She would ask how Yasha came upon it later.

“You look a little worried.”

“I’m just wondering whether I can possibly do it justice!” she said. “Really, Yasha. This isn’t just any Old Master. It’s a masterpiece. It’s impossible to re-create. Impossible.”

“I don’t like that word, ‘impossible.’ ”

“I’m afraid I would be wasting your time,” said Serena. “I’m sorry. You need someone much better than me.”

“I can’t think of anyone better than you. If there were someone better than you, he or she would be here instead. I know you can do it, and I didn’t have you down as someone so defeatist,” said Yasha. “You haven’t even picked up your paintbrush.”

“I don’t think I should. I don’t think I can.”

“I need you to try,” Yasha insisted. “You have to.”

Yasha’s soft tone made Serena think that perhaps it was possible. Perhaps she could recreate the painting to such a standard that an expert might be fooled. But beneath the softness there was a determination that she
would do what he required of her. And she was reminded when he said “I didn’t bring you out here to have you make excuses” that she had taken the commission not for the challenge of it or the incredible fifty-thousand-pound fee they had negotiated but because he had made it clear to her that the alternative was far less appealing.

As she stood over the painting, studying its beauty and nibbling at one of her cuticles, the sound of Katie’s singing drifted up to the open window. Serena glanced out to see her daughter serenading Bunny, who was propped up on one of the garden chairs. Leonid watched too from his seat on the hood of the car.

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

“I know you will.”

After Yasha went back downstairs, Serena remained alone in the attic with the painting. This was by far the strangest moment of her life. She was reminded of the story of the farmer who told the king that his daughter was able to spin straw into gold. Serena remembered a drawing in the book of fairy tales that now had a place on the shelf in Katie’s bedroom. The girl all alone. The dust motes dancing in the shaft of sunlight from the single high window. The enormous pile of straw. Well, here was her enormous pile of straw: one Renaissance masterpiece and a worthless old canvas upon which to re-create it. But where was her Rumpelstiltskin?

Serena ran her fingers over the young girl’s face, trying to imagine the moment when the paint was still wet and the girl sat living and breathing in front of the artist. It was as though she hoped that by touching the painting some magic might happen. Sensing a woman in distress, perhaps the artist himself might slip in spirit from the painting into the ends of her fingers. Nothing happened. And when she tried to conjure her spirit artist to her, she
could only see Colin Firth in that movie about Vermeer. Perhaps not even in the right movie. Was Vermeer ever wet-shirted?

She could just steal the painting. It was almost certainly in the wrong hands. There would be some kind of reward, surely, for returning it to its rightful owner. It would be enough to keep her and Katie going for a while. But glancing out of the window again, she saw Leonid, smoking in his studied casual way. She had no doubt that he did more for Yasha than park the cars and that he would be very happy to get his hands dirty. And if she did manage to get away from the farmhouse with her daughter and the picture, if she managed to get the painting to INTERPOL, she would have to spend her whole life on the run.

There was no way out. Only through.

So Serena decided she would give this craziest of commissions a shot. She could only hope that when Yasha saw how foolish it was to think that he could ever pass off her work as that of Ricasoli, he would not be too angry and let her and Katie go back to London without a fuss. To that end, she set up her working materials at once, so that Yasha would believe she was in earnest.

“Leonid and I are going to stay here until you’re finished,” Yasha announced over lunch. “I’m sure you understand that I don’t want to leave you alone in the house with a priceless Renaissance masterpiece, and it’s hard to get a security staff you can trust. I mean, I don’t think Luca, the guy who brought you here, knows an old master from his arsehole, but there have been a lot of burglaries around here lately, and I don’t want my painting to end up in some Sienese flea market.”

Serena nodded. Katie was less upset at the thought that they would not be alone in the house.

“Good,” she said. “Leonid can be the lifeguard so I can go swimming.”

CHAPTER 47

J
ust before coming to Italy, Serena had sent Yasha a shopping list. It had contained not only the food she would need to keep Katie happy, but also a variety of far rarer items. Since painting the Renaissance Madonna for Julian, Serena had become quite the expert on the tools of the Renaissance artists. Yasha had sourced every one. He had understood that Serena was not going to be able to pull off this piece of alchemy with a few tubes of paint from Winsor and Newton. He’d found the raw ingredients. Here were mercury and lead oxide, resin from the Garcinia tree for gamboges, yellow ochre, and lead tin. A piece of old ivory to burn for bone black. A jar of cochineal beetles to make carmine. And for the ultramarine she would need for the Virgin’s robe, a piece of lapis lazuli worth thousands of pounds. From Afghanistan, Yasha promised. That was important, as at the time Ricasoli was painting, it would have been his only source. Lapis from anywhere else would give the painting away in a second when someone sampled a sliver of paint, as they inevitably would at some point. To that effect, the lead oxide to make white also gave Serena pause. “It could give us away,” she warned Yasha over dinner.

“Ah,” said Yasha. “I have good news. The painting was
restored in the nineteenth century. That’s well documented. They’ll be expecting slightly later whites.”

Serena shrugged. She hoped it wouldn’t be her problem by then. But her attention to detail extended even to the brushes she used. The Renaissance masters had used badger hair, and thus among the haul of goodies Yasha had acquired for her were several old-fashioned gentleman’s shaving brushes, which she would chop into smaller bunches of bristles.

Yasha listened in awe as she explained her methods over dinner on their first night together in the house. She told him why she wanted noxious-smelling formaldehyde. “Traditional oil paints take half a century to dry out. Anyone could find out how recently a canvas had been painted by holding a rag dipped in alcohol over the paint and watching for a reaction.”

“I know,” said Yasha. “That is how I confirmed my suspicions about your other Madonna.”

“The formaldehyde will solve that problem by speeding the process up,” she promised. It would have the added advantage, Serena hoped, of discouraging Yasha from visiting her studio too often.

“Will you join me in an after-dinner drink?” he asked. “It would be nice to get to know each other better, don’t you think? Since we’re going to be together for the next three weeks.”

Serena shook her head. “I’ve got work to do.”

She intended to paint around the clock to ensure that she and Katie were out of this situation as quickly as humanly possible.

So while Yasha sipped a contemplative brandy and watched the stars with Leonid, Serena set to work cleaning the worthless canvas she was hoping to transform into a priceless old master. Yasha had provided a rather ugly
daub of a man counting money. He’d bought it in a junk shop two years before, thinking it might have potential, but had never found it another home. It was the exact right period, of course, but it had another advantage. In a funny way, the pose of the man echoed the pose of the Madonna, meaning that should Serena be unable to remove the original painting absolutely, she should be able to incorporate what remained.

To remove the paint was a painstaking process. Serena was grateful for the efforts of so many forgers before her who had refined the methods she was using. Many had tried to remove old paint quickly using harsh solvents, with disastrous results. There was no substitute for plain old elbow grease. With a pumice stone and a bowl of soapy water, Serena lifted the old man from the canvas a micrometer at a time.

It took her the best part of two days just to remove the old painting and the artist’s sketch beneath. She was left with the original primer layer. That layer she needed to leave intact, as a vitally important part of the process ahead.

Yasha looked in from time to time. “Just checking you haven’t climbed out of the window.”

“You think I’d leave my daughter?”

Yasha nodded at the canvas, which was now blank and rather shabby-looking.

“It’s coming on,” he said.

Alone again in the attic, Serena put her hands on her hips and surveyed her work so far. This was a daunting moment. She had her blank canvas. Now she had to find the magic. She picked up a red crayon to begin her own underdrawing. But before she started, she decided it might be a good idea to make a little record of this most important commission.

Though he seemed to have thought of everything else, Yasha had not thought to take Serena’s mobile phone away. The house was extremely remote. To get a signal required an hour-long hike to the nearest high point, and so he had determined that Serena would not be calling for backup. What he had failed to consider was that the camera function on her phone still worked.

Click.

In a second, Serena captured the Ricasoli and the blank canvas that would become its twin. Here was her insurance. Proof that a copy had been made. She would take several more pictures in the days ahead as she completed her underdrawing and at last began work on the painting.

CHAPTER 48

J
ust as the old portrait of the moneylender had been removed layer by layer, the new Ricasoli was built up in the same way. After each layer, the painting was put into the oven and Serena spent an anxious few hours waiting for the process to complete. A moment too long and her work could come out discolored, overcooked. But the ruse worked perfectly, as a way both of drying the paint and of aging it. After each firing, the craquelure, the fine network of cracks that appear in a painting over time, would reappear exactly as they’d appeared in the primer layer, like a memory. A wash of india ink filled the new cracks to give the impression of
centuries of dust. Over the course of three weeks, Serena would age her painting by almost four hundred years.