By now I realized what paintings it had been adapted from, for a convincing forgery is seldom hatched full-blown in the forger's mind; it is borrowed from authentic works of the artist. The face was from A Man in a Red Turban, but turned to the right instead of the left; the hat was from the great Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride.
Although I tried explaining all this, I don't think I got through to either of them. But Blusher understood enough to walk a few steps away and drop disconsolately onto a frayed sofa, then lower his head and massage his brow with both hands, as if he'd just heard the end of the world was due tomorrow morning.
There was something going on that I didn't understand. "Mr. Blusher—"
"Mike, Mike," he corrected absently, continuing to rub his temples.
"Mike, why is this so important to you? This isn't yours anyway, is it? From what Calvin told me, it's not part of your order. It got included by accident. "
"Of course it got included by accident. You saw the crap downstairs. That's what I order. I already called my shippers about this three times, in Bologna. They don't know how it got included, they don't know where it came from, they don't want anything to do with it."
"What's the name of the shipping company?" I asked.
"Salvatore, Salvatori, something like that."
"Salvatorelli? "
Blusher looked surprised. "Yeah, you know them?"
I nodded, not too pleased that I'd guessed right. "We're arranging a show, Northerners in Italy. Salvatorelli's handling the shipping."
"Nice move, Chris," Calvin said out of the side of his mouth.
"They're an old firm," I said unhappily. "They have a good reputation. The Pinacoteca uses them."
"Yeah, well, you better count your Brueghels all the same."
"Anyway," Blusher continued, "they said to go ahead and keep the paintings, as far as they're concerned. They didn't want to be bothered. I got that in writing." His head came up with a sudden shrewd glance. "Of course, I didn't tell them exactly what we got here." Down went his head again, into his hands. "Ah, what difference does it make, if they're fakes?"
"But even if they were real, you couldn't keep them. You'd have to return them to the owner. And even if nobody knew who the owner was, the Italian government would never sit still and let you have them."
"Yeah, sure," he said impatiently. "I was thinking of the publicity."
"Publicity?"
His head came up again to regard me with dull wonder, as if he couldn't comprehend how anyone could be this dense. "Look. I'm in the art business, right? I sell pictures, right? If I really turned up a genuine van Eyck it'd be news all over the country, right?" This time, apparently, he expected a response. He waited.
"Right," I said.
"Sure, right. And that's what we call publicity. If you were buying art from somebody, wouldn't you want to buy it from the guy that discovered the lost van Eyck?"
"I suppose so," I said doubtfully.
He sighed. "You explain it to him, Boyer."
"It's all a matter of marketing," Calvin said soberly to me. "Very important."
Blusher nodded, satisfied.
"Do you mind if I touch this?" I asked.
Blusher shrugged.
I lifted the panel, turned it over, and put it carefully back on the padded shelf, facedown, so the back was visible.
"Just what I thought," I said after a second. "This is real."
Blusher leaped up. "It's re—"
"Not the painting," I said hurriedly. "The panel."
"The panel? You mean the wood?" He gave a croak of laughter. "Who gives a shit about the wood?"
"It's not going to get you much in the way of big-time publicity," I said with a smile, "but it's interesting all the same."
I gestured at the back of the panel; it was made of two broad oak planks joined together, then enclosed in the groove of a sturdy, simple frame. "This black marking—like a V with a wreath around it—that's the logo of the Guild of St. Luke in Utrecht, the painter's guild. These cuts in the wood— they're from the way they sawed oak in those days in Holland. It was cut by a water-driven frame saw. Quarter-sawn, you'll notice. Early seventeenth-century, I'm pretty sure. "
Calvin looked at me, gratifyingly impressed. "You really know your stuff."
"So?" Blusher said. "What difference does it make?"
"Well, it proves we've got a first-rate forger here; somebody who takes his work seriously. Somehow he's gotten hold of one of the genuine old panels that the guild gave to its members." I smiled. "Wrong century, though. Van Eyck painted in the 1400s. And he did most of his work in The Hague and Bruges, not Utrecht."
"Hey," Blusher said with a slow awakening of interest, "could there be a real painting underneath the damn van Eyck? You know, that got covered up, painted over?"
"Could be," I said. "Somebody probably did paint something on it in the seventeenth century, and the chances are good it's still there. If you're going to forge an old picture you get better results painting over an old one than scraping it off and starting fresh."
"Yeah?" He came closer to peer at the panel. "Is that right?"
"If you're thinking there might be a Rembrandt under there, forget it. That doesn't happen. Nobody paints over Rembrandt. Or Rubens, or van Gogh, or—"
"So sue me," Blusher said. "Excuse me for living. I just asked a question, that's all."
"You could always take it in to have it X-rayed," I volunteered. "We don't do that at the museum, but if you talk to Eleanor Freeman in the radiography department at UW, she'd be able to do it for you."
"Yeah," Blusher said. "Sure. Maybe I'll do that." He smiled good-naturedly, quite mellow now, shook hands with us, and started walking us back across the room. "Well, thanks for coming, big guys. Sorry I dragged you down here for nothing."
He laid his heavy arm around Calvin's slim shoulders. "What I said about that check still goes, buddy. It's not your
fault."
"Thanks a lot, Mike. We really appreciate that. Hey, can I ask you something?"
"Shoot."
"If your goods come from Bologna, how come your firm is called Venezia?"
"It's all a matter of marketing," Blusher said with a grin. "If you were selling quality art products would you name your outfit Bologna?"
We all laughed.
"Hey," said Calvin, "we forgot about the other painting, the Rubens."
Blusher clapped his hand to his forehead. "You're right. What do you say, Norgren, you want to take a look as long as you're here?"
"Sure." If the "Rubens" was as well-done as the "van Eyck," I wanted to see it. And after that authentic old panel, I was curious about what this one was painted on.
We went back to the cabinet. Blusher slid in the drawer with the "van Eyck" and pulled out the one below it. In it was a slightly larger painting, not on wood but canvas, in an ornate, gilded Renaissance frame.
I leaned over to take a closer look at the painting itself. I looked hard, just to be sure, but it took me less time to reach a conclusion on this one than on the other. No more than five seconds.
I looked up from it, first at Calvin, then at Blusher.
"It's real," I said. "It's a Rubens."
Not only that, but I knew just which Rubens it was; a loving, exuberant portrait of his second wife, Hélène Fourment, painted in 1630. The pink and pretty Hélène had been sixteen when she'd married the gout-ridden but hearty fifty-three-year-old artist, and some of his most joyous and personal works—no question of student participation here—were portraits of her. This was one of the most charming—all flirty eyes, rosy flesh, and scaffolded bosom.
More important, it was without a doubt the Rubens that had been stolen from Clara Gozzi's neo-Gothic Ferrara townhouse twenty-two months earlier.