The Colonel picked up and tossed the core of his apple toward the fireplace. It missed and came to rest beside the bookshelf, just below the gap left by the removal of two marbled notebooks. The Colonel did not speak for a moment, and Blume felt sure he must be staring at the same empty spot. Then he heard a grunt and a crunch, as the Colonel helped himself to another apple and bit into it.
Keeping his movements leisurely, Blume withdrew his gaze from the empty slot on the shelves, and said, “Is no personality a good or a bad thing?”
“For a forger, it’s good.” The Colonel took another bite, and swallowed without chewing. “To know without being known.” He finished the apple and this time dropped the core back into the bowl, then casually fingered a leopard-skin banana. “To know without being known,” he repeated. “It’s a good philosophy for policemen and for serious artists, as well as for forgers. It’s the opposite for politicians and junk celebrities. They want to be known without knowing.”
“And Treacy?”
“I think he began to be attracted by notoriety. So he began to want to be known, which is suicidal if you’re a forger.”
“Suicidal or the sort of thing that can get you killed?” asked Blume.
“Good point. What you don’t want is notoriety or personality. You do not want people to be able to point at a work and say: That’s a Treacy.”
“So he adopted the personality of the painter he was copying?” said Blume.
“Not the personality. What I mean is he didn’t let his own come through. You’re an American, so you must have been brought up watching Westerns, right?”
“Westerns are more your generation, Colonel. I was more into Starsky and Hutch.”
“What’s that?”
“ Kojak, you’ve heard of Kojak?”
“Yes,” said the Colonel.
“Well, Starsky and Hutch were… Never mind. They were nothing like Kojak. Rockford Files? Harry O? ”
The Colonel was shaking his head impatiently.
“ Hawaii Five-0. Jesus, I loved that,” said Blume. He thought of Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, turning around to look straight at the camera, those three strands of hair out of place, an effect that he used to try and imitate in front of the mirror. Jack Lord had a scar on his face, too, come to think of it. He brought his attention back to the Colonel. “You were saying something about Westerns.”
“Westerns are always set in the 1880s or 1890s,” said the Colonel.
“Well, you’re the expert,” said Blume. “But the American Old West goes back at least to the Gold Rush, which was 1848.”
“I’m not interested in that now,” said the Colonel.
“First you start talking about Westerns, now you’re not interested.”
“You are being obtuse, Commissioner.” The Colonel took the banana, peeled it, and examined the fruit and nodded in approval. He pressed half the banana into his mouth, paused, then spoke.
“When you watch a Western, you can always tell when it was made. They try to dress like it was the nineteenth century, but you can clearly see the styles of the 1940s or ’50s or ’60s in the clothes, in the makeup, the hairstyles. And that’s not even counting the colors used in the print. It takes, what, about five seconds for you to recognize the decade in which the film was made, even without seeing an actor. The personality of the period comes through.”
“True,” said Blume.
“And yet the directors at the time were usually trying to make things look as nineteenth century as possible.” He ate the second half of the banana. “It’s the same thing with forgers. You keep looking at one of their works, and you get a feel for when it was really painted, not when it was supposed to be. Naturally, this makes it easier to spot forgeries from the past, from the 1940s or 1950s, say. Forgeries made now are harder to spot, not because they’re better, but because we are incapable of seeing the style of our own time. We’re too close. We watch a Western made in the last few years, it looks more accurate than the ones made in the 1950s. That’s the beauty of Henry Treacy’s work. It doesn’t have a strong personality. Nothing comes through. He’s timeless.”
The Colonel put the banana skin on the table, struggled, and rose from his chair and walked over to the davenport desk. He opened a drawer that Blume had completely missed earlier and pulled out a rolled-up piece of paper, and, holding it reverently, showed it to Blume. “Beautiful buff paper, but machine-made, so no attempt at passing it off as authentic, but look at the skill.”
Blume saw a yellow and gray image of a woman looking down at her foot.
“This is where he excelled. This is what he sold. Of course he used paper from the period.”
“Where did he get it?”
“All sort of places. Fly leaves in old books, old paintings or drawings. Old sketchbooks. You saw that Latin missal in the kitchen? That would have made a good source of paper. What do you think it is?”
“A woman hitching up her dress, turning out her foot-it looks unfinished,” said Blume. “He didn’t do her other foot.”
“What we do is we search through the paintings of Raphael, Bronzino, Parmigianino, or Annibale Carracci.”
“We?”
“You and I. Let me finish, Commissioner. If we find this woman, or a woman in this pose, or something that reminds us strongly of it, then we would market this work here as a preparatory sketch by the artist. Seventy thousand euros, minus handling expenses and assuming a good outcome after examination by experts. That works out at maybe twenty thousand for you, thirty for me. And that’s just this one. Of course, maybe it won’t work out so well.”
“You just said it was on modern paper and not salable.”
“Quite right. This one here is worth almost nothing. But then he did another just like it. On proper paper. My men removed it earlier. And there are eight more forgeries. I would need to look at them closely to make sure they are marketable, but at first glance I was impressed. More than you, obviously, since you left them here with an aggressive and none-too-bright junior officer guarding the scene.”
The Colonel pulled a fat aluminum cigar case from his breast pocket. He unsheathed the cigar, sliced the end with a silver cutter, then, with plenty of cheek-puffing and grunts, got it alight. When he had surrounded himself in sweet blue smoke, he said: “Well, are we working together or not?”
Blume decided to allow the question to hang in the air with the cigar smoke while he worked out a strategy.
“Well?” insisted the Colonel.
Blume parried with a question of his own. “What about Treacy’s partner, John Nightingale? He must know about the paintings in here.”
“A good practical question,” said the Colonel, lowering himself back into the seat. “But Nightingale almost certainly knows nothing about these. They did not get on very well. Clash of personalities or nationalities or something along those lines. One reason they had the gallery was to maintain a neutral space where they could meet. Treacy told me that once. I don’t think Nightingale was ever in this house.”
“You know a lot, Colonel. So you must also know how they worked together. Logic suggests that Nightingale must have known what Treacy was preparing. To organize things ahead of time.”
“Logic maybe,” said the Colonel. “But that is not how it worked at all. Like so many Anglo-Saxon fraudsters, they considered themselves essentially upright men forced to compromise with Mediterranean reality. Not only did Treacy not say what he was preparing, I know for a fact that he never even told Nightingale he was making fakes. I had this from both of them, and though I struggled to believe it at first, I think it was true. They liked to pretend that Treacy had somehow come across a valuable painting or, as an alternative, that he had created a pastiche on period canvas and then forgotten to mention this incidental detail to Nightingale. Nightingale always said he could pass a lie-detector test if he had to. It was always possible that Treacy was finding genuine old masters and passing them on.”