What I could do, I told Christian, was to put him in touch with a London gallery that sold forgeries as forgeries, clearly marked. (Yes, truly, there are such places.) When the forger was famous and the forgeries notorious, the pictures could sell for fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. Considering the tangled story of upper-crust revenge and murder that was about to hit the world's presses, these could well be worth even more, which meant that Christian himself could probably clear fifteen thousand apiece on them.
His eyelids whirred, probably from the calculations going on behind them. Twenty-five pictures at $15,000 came to $375,000, whereas he'd been hoping for the millions that would have come from slowly passing off the fakes as originals. But he knew I wasn't going to let him get away with that.
The whirring stopped. "All right, deal," he said again. "You son of a bitch."
"I'll call you," I said.
"I can hardly wait."
As he left, Calvin and Anne came up. Anne handed me a glass of champagne.
"Not that we meant to eavesdrop-" Anne said.
"Hey, perish the thought," said Calvin.
"-but did we or did we not just hear you talk Christian out of Vachey's self-portrait?"
"You did," I said, highly pleased with my performance overall. I was imagining Mann's reaction to the news about his beloved Flinck.
"What for?"
"What for do I want Vachey's picture? To hang in my office."
Anne blinked. "Christopher Norgren is going to have a Leger in his office-and a fake Leger at that?"
I laughed. "As a reminder," I said.
She made a face. "Of what?"
I hardly knew how to explain. "I don't know… of an extraordinary man, of a weird few days, of getting out of here alive, of-"
"How about of how fundamentally full of crap all these art experts are?" Calvin volunteered.
"Calvin-" I began indignantly.
"Sometimes," he quickly added.
I considered the emendation. "Calvin," I said, "you got it."