It took her a while to think of an answer. When she did, she said, ‘The price would be whatever the seller asked or whatever the buyer was willing to pay. The market prices are in dollars - a hundred thousand? Two? More? But there really are no prices because there are so few pieces of this quality. It would depend entirely on how much the buyer wanted to have the piece, and on how much money he had.’
Brunetti translated her prices into millions of lire: two hundred million, three? Before he could complete this speculation, she continued.
‘But that’s only for the pottery, the vases. To the best of my knowledge, none of the statues of the soldiers has disappeared, but if that were to happen, there really is no price that could be put on it.’
‘But there’s also no way the owner could show it publicly, is there?’ Brunetti asked.
She smiled. ‘I’m afraid there are people who don’t care about showing things publicly. They just want to possess, be sure that a certain piece is theirs. I’ve no idea if they’re prompted by love of beauty or the desire of ownership, but, believe me, there are people who simply want to have a piece in their collection, even if no one ever sees it. Aside from themselves, that is.’ She saw how sceptical he looked at this, so she added, ‘Remember that Japanese billionaire, the one who wanted to be buried with his Van Gogh?’
Brunetti remembered having read something about it, last year. The man was said to have bought the painting at auction and then had it written in his will that he was to be buried with the painting, or, to put things in the proper order of importance, the painting was to be buried with him. He remembered something about a storm in the art world over this. ‘In the end, he gave up and said he wouldn’t do it, didn’t he?’
‘Well, that’s what was reported,’ she agreed. ‘I never believed the story, but I mention him to give you an idea of how some people feel about their possessions, how they believe that their right of ownership is the absolute measure or the chief purpose of collecting, not the beauty of the object.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I’m not explaining this very well, but, as I said, it doesn’t make any sense to me.’
Brunetti realized he still didn’t have a sufficient answer to his original question. ‘But I still don’t understand how you know that something is an original or a copy.’ Before she could answer, he added, ‘A friend of mine told me about that sixth sense you get, that something just looks right or wrong to you. But that’s very subjective. What I mean is this: if two experts disagree, one saying the piece is original and another saying it isn’t, how do you resolve the difference? Call in a third expert and take a vote?’ He smiled to show he was joking, but he could think of no other way out of the situation.
Her answering smile showed she got the joke. ‘No, we call in the technicians. There are a number of tests we can perform to prove the age of an object.’ With a change of voice, she asked, ‘Are you sure you want to listen to all of this?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘I’ll try not to be too pedantic about it,’ she said, pulling her feet up under her on the sofa. ‘There are all sorts of tests that we can do on paintings: analysis of the chemical composition of paints to see if they’re right for the time when the picture is said to have been painted, X-rays to see what’s underneath the surface layer of a painting, even Carbon-14 dating.’ He nodded to show that he was familiar with all of these.
‘But we’re not talking about paintings,’ he said.
‘No, we’re not. The Chinese never worked in oils, at least not in the periods covered in the show. Most of the objects were ceramic or metal. I’ve never been interested in the metal pieces, well, not very much, but I do know it’s almost impossible to cheek them scientifically. For them, you need the eye.’
‘But not for ceramic?’
‘Of course you need the expert eye, but, luckily, the techniques for checking authenticity are as sophisticated as they are for painting.’ She paused a moment and asked again, ‘Do you want me to be technical?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said, finding his pen and, in the doing, feeling very much like a student.
‘The chief technique we use — and the most reliable - is called thermoluminescence. All we have to do is extract about thirty miligrams of ceramic from any piece we want to test.’ She anticipated his question by explaining, ‘It’s easy. We take it from the back of a plate or from the underside of a vase or a statue. The amount we need is barely noticeable, just enough to get a sample. Then a photo multiplier will tell us, with an accuracy of about ten to fifteen per cent, the age of the material.’
‘How does it work?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I mean, on what principle?’
‘When clay is fired, well, if it’s fired above about 300 degrees centigrade, then all the electrons in the material it’s made out of will be - I suppose there’s no better word for it — they’ll be erased. The heat destroys their electric charges. Then, from that point on, they begin to pick up new electrical charges. That’s what the photo multiplier measures, how much energy they’ve absorbed. The older the material is, the brighter it glows.’
‘And this is accurate?’
‘As I said, to about fifteen per cent. That means, with a piece that’s supposed to be two thousand years old, we can get a reading that will tell us, to within about three hundred years, when it was made - well, when it was last fired.’
‘And did you do this test on the pieces while you were in China?’
She shook her head. ‘No, there’s no equipment like that in Xian.’
‘So how can you be sure?’
She smiled when she answered him. ‘The eye. I looked at them, and I was fairly sure they were fake.’
‘But to be sure? Did you ask anyone else?’
‘I told you. I wrote to Semenzato. And when I didn’t get an answer, I came back here.’ She saved him the question. ‘Yes, I brought samples with me, samples from the three pieces I was most suspicious of and from the other two that I think might be false.’
‘Did Semenzato know you had these samples?’
‘No. I never mentioned it to him.’
‘Where are they?’
‘I stopped in California on the way here and left one set with a friend of mine who’s a curator at the Getty. They have the equipment, so I asked him to run them through for me.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I called him when I got home from the hospital. All three of the pieces that I thought were fake were made within the last few years.’
‘And the other two?’
‘One of them is genuine. The other is a fake.’
‘Is one test enough?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
Even if it weren’t sufficient proof, Brunetti realized, what had happened to her and Semenzato was.
After a moment, Brett asked, ‘Now what?’
‘We try to find out who killed Semenzato and who the two men who came here were.’
Her look was level and very sceptical. Finally, she asked, ‘And what are the chances of that?’