Twice that week the SEALs had a four-thirty end of the day, and both times Bradford took Xenia out to dinner. Once at Marie Callender’s Restaurant, the other time at Denny’s. They talked painting. Bradford almost wished he was out of the SEALs and painting full time. He had a knack for it, and with more experience he should be able to make a living at it. But he knew he didn’t have the deft touch that Xenia had.
“How do you get such shadings in your work?” he asked.
“Practice, amigo. I’ve been painting for fifteen years, every day, all day. For the first five years I almost starved. I shared an apartment with another painter. I slept with him and he fed me. It was a good arrangement. When I sold enough paintings to go on my own, I moved out.”
“You’re good. You should be able to get more for your work than two or three hundred.”
“Hey, I pay the bills, meet the rent on time, and eat more or less regularly.”
That night they had another wine-and-cheese showing. They had distributed handbills: “Six starving artists showing their work tonight from six to ten.” They draped a hundred of them on cars parked along India and in one big parking lot. Xenia wore a modest blouse and sold a painting. Bradford came up empty, but one woman nearly bought one until her husband pulled her away. Bradford almost slugged him.
Upstairs, after the lights went off on the displays, Xenia pulled off her blouse and threw it against the wall. “Hate clothes. Why do we have to wear them?” She grabbed her brushes, which she had left in water so they wouldn’t go dry, and wiped them off, then went to work on the second of the two portraits of older men. Bradford watched her.
“You often paint in the nude?” he asked. She said she did, and slipped out of her skirt and underpants.
“Yes, that’s more like it,” Bradford said. He let her paint for another half hour, and then grabbed her and carried her to her cot.
“All right, but a quickie. I’ve got to have that painting ready to ship in two weeks, and it takes more than a week to dry. Stay with me and we’ll both work until midnight.”
They did.
The next night Bradford moved his easel into her room and painted and watched her. She was good. He was curious about the portrait. It vaguely reminded him of something. Bradford concentrated on the painting, and the only thing he could think of was a Rembrandt-type work. Not Rembrandt but of that era, back when paintings were commissioned by wealthy patrons who always wanted portraits of them and their families.
Xenia went downstairs to the bathroom, and he looked at her desk. Her checkbook lay there. He flipped it open to the last check written. The balance slammed up at him and he was astonished. Xenia had over fifteen thousand dollars in her checking account.
He put it back and went to his painting. He made three mistakes in a row, and took his pallet knife, scraped off the oil, and did it again. Nice thing about oil. Make a mistake, take it off and do it again. Her bank balance worried him. The old-master-style paintings worried him. She never exhibited any of them downstairs. He wondered why not. Slowly he began to get an idea, and he didn’t like it.
She had said she sold her portrait paintings for twenty thousand dollars. Maybe she wasn’t kidding. She came back, and he made an excuse about a hard day the next day. She frowned.
“Something I said?”
“No. I just have to leave. See you in a couple of days. We have a night problem tomorrow.” She knew he was a SEAL, she would buy that.
The next night, as soon as he was off work, he drove to the main library on Eighth Street downtown. He went to the reference room and found three huge books on Rembrandt and his fellow painters in the 1600’s in Holland. There were hundreds of pictures, and at last he found what he was looking for. A school of painters who did works that looked much like the portraits that Xenia did. He studied them for an hour, and when he was almost ready to give up, he found a series of four portraits that looked almost identical to the type that she was doing.
He read the name. Roycen Van Dyke. He’d died in 1673. The article about him said that he was a perfectionist, that he did few paintings, and that he sold even fewer. The archives recorded only twelve of his works, but experts figured there were probably a hundred or more that had been lost or destroyed, or maybe were sitting on dusty shelves in some studio storage rooms in Europe or the United States.
What a perfect cover. More of the Van Dykes could be “found” and sold at a good price. Not for millions, but for maybe a hundred thousand. He had to confront her about it. No way around it.
The next night he worked hard on his oil, and was pleased with the two hours of effort. Then Xenia came in and he knew he had to talk to her about his suspicions, to find out for sure. She invited him for a beer, and they went into her room. At once he went to her painting and stared at it. Then he was sure. The shadings, the tones, the size of the bust in the picture. He turned to Xenia, who came with two bottles of beer.
“Roycen Van Dyke,” he said.
Xenia closed her eyes and wilted. She put the beer on a table and sank onto the cot.
“Why did you have to find out? Why? Things were going so well. I sell two of them a year and then I can paint what I want to.”
“Where?”
“A man in Santa Barbara specializes in ‘recovered’ old masters and not-quite old masters.”
“And you do get twenty thousand each for them?”
“Yes. I don’t know how much he sells them for. I picked Van Dyke because he’s almost unknown in this country. But he has enough of a name that some private collector will look him up and buy. For fifty or sixty thousand that collector has what looks exactly like an old master and he can show it off to his friends.”
“It’s called forgery and fraud.”
Her voice was small. “I know. Damnit, I know. I’m better than this. I should be getting five thousand for a painting, maybe ten or fifteen thousand for my own work. But I’m stuck here showing off my tits and hoping for a three-hundred-dollar sale of a nude.”
“You could stop doing Van Dyke.”
“Sure, and really starve. I tried that. Who do you suppose pays for the rent when the other four can’t get up their share? Who pays for all of the lights and heat? Yeah, you’re being kept by the goodness of Van Dyke, whether you know it or not.”
“You’ve got to walk away from it, Xenia. If they nail you, it could mean ten years in prison. Then how would you paint?”
“I can’t leave it yet. Right now I don’t have the studio contacts to show my work where I can get enough money. Maybe in a year. I have one who shows me. I need three or four more. They are hard to find, and they take forty percent. I’m jacking my prices up to three thousand for my big works, instead of three hundred. So far I’ve sold one up in Laguna Beach of all places. I need more time. Maybe these two Van Dykes and two more and I’ll be set.”
“Do you sign them?”
“Oh, God, no. That would be a sure giveaway. These are supposed to be old ones he wasn’t too proud of and they got lost somewhere. So he didn’t sign them.”
“If this dealer in Santa Barbara gets arrested, would he give you up?”
“Charlie? Sure, if it would save him a couple of years off his sentence. He’d give up his mother and his brother. Who also are both in the forgery business.”
They sat there looking at each other.
“X, I don’t know how to help you.”
“Nobody can help me. I do it on my own. I always have. Always will. Now get the hell out of here and let me have a long cry. Maybe I’ll speak to you again, and maybe the fuck I won’t.”
5
Training the next two weeks was the hardest Murdock could remember. He made sure it stayed that way. Men could die in the field if they couldn’t run fast enough, if they couldn’t shoot straight, and for a dozen other reasons that could be prevented or at least made less likely by tough, realistic training.