“That’s terrific, but on the other hand I have to ask you if I can make a phone call.”
“I told you, I don’t make those rules. But when the operation is complete, and the surveillance is lifted, you may call anyone you like. Always being discreet, of course. Because, you understand me, there is no-how shall I put it?-statutes of limitations on art forgery. That is, until the actual witnesses are deceased, the authenticity of the painting is always at risk. With one careless word an object worth many tens, hundreds, of millions becomes a mere pastiche and worth nothing, and then the buyers look to get their money back. They go to the dealer and of course he talks, and then the cord that holds it all together unravels. Then it is either prison for all of us or a worse fate, if in any way the gentlemen I referred to earlier are in the least implicated. Not a happy prospect. Especially not for you. Or for your family.”
When he said that I almost lost a mouthful of whitebait, but I managed to get it down and asked him, “What’re you talking about? My family?”
“Well, only as a means of controlling you. While you remain alive.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, well, I speak loosely of witnesses, but in affairs like this one, there is only one witness who counts. I mean, Baldassare knows, and Franco, and that girl who posed, but no one cares about them. Anyone can cry forgery and the interests that wish for the painting to be original can always shout them down. It happens all the time. But one witness can never be shouted down.” He paused and inclined his head toward me and snapped a bit of fish from his fork.
“The forger himself,” I said.
“Just so. Now don’t be downhearted, Wilmot, I beg you. As I keep saying, this is a new life you are in now. Danger, yes, but when has real art not been associated with a certain danger? Quattrocento Florence was a violent place, and art’s greatest patrons have always been violent men.”
“Like the Nazis?” A little dig there, but he didn’t blink.
“I was thinking of the robber barons of America or the aristocrats of Europe. And the artists themselves have always been freebooters, living on the edges of society. When art becomes domesticated into a branch of show business, it becomes flaccid and dull, as now.”
“Sorry, but that’s nonsense, like Harry Lime’s remark about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man. Velázquez had a steady job-”
“Yes, and in his lifetime he did fewer than one hundred fifty paintings. Rembrandt, living on the edge of life, did over five hundred.”
“And Vermeer, who was even more on the edge, did forty. I’m sorry, it won’t wash, Krebs. You can’t generalize about what kind of temperament and what social conditions produce great painting. It’s a mystery.”
I could see he was starting to get a little steamed to have his pet theories exploded like this, but it’s always gotten me steamed to hear theories about how art happens dumped on my head by people who never handled a brush. But then he shrugged, and smiled, and said, “Well, perhaps you’re right. It is a life I am used to, and we all tell ourselves stories to justify ourselves to ourselves and others, because we wish to have some company in these little scenarios. But I see it is not to be, you have a head as hard as mine. And really, it does not matter in the least, as long as you do not forget that the sword that hangs over us is harder than both our heads. Ah, good, here is our meal.”
The food was excellent, but I had acid on my tongue and could hardly taste it. I drank more than my share of the wine, however, and got enough of a buzz to keep me in my seat instead of running out of the place screaming hysterically. Krebs chewed away on his scampi and I wondered how he’d ever gotten used to this kind of life. I mean, he seemed like an ordinary guy, no more ruthless-in fact, maybe less ruthless-than the typical high-end New York gallery magnate.
I wanted to jab him some more, though, so I said, “Is it true, by the way, that you got your start selling pictures stolen from murdered Jews?”
“Yes,” he said blandly, “perfectly true. But as I’m sure you know, there was no question of returning these things to the rightful owners. It would be like trying to return a carving to an Assyrian or an Aztec. They were dead. I sincerely wish they hadn’t died, but I didn’t kill them. I was thirteen when the war ended. So what was I supposed to do, leave them in a Swiss vault forever?”
“An interesting moral point.”
“Yes, and I’ll tell you another one, as long as you’ve brought up the subject. My father was a Nazi and I was raised as a Nazi. Everyone of my generation was. As a boy I could not wait to be old enough to join the forces and fight for the Reich. I believed every lie they told me, as I imagine you believed the lies your country told you. Tell me, were you in Vietnam?”
“No, I was exempt. I had a kid.”
“Lucky you. According to the Vietnamese your country killed three million of their people, most of them civilians. I’m not excusing what the Nazis did, of course, just pointing out that Germany is not alone in slaughtering innocents, and for a long time the Americans supported that war. Now I will tell you an amusing story. In December of 1944 my whole family was back in Munich and the city was being bombed day and night. My father was naturally concerned for the safety of his family, and so he pulled strings and got us out of there, to a place that had never been bombed and which was considered quite safe. Do you know where this was? It was Dresden. We were there in February when the Allies burnt the city to the ground. I survived; my mother did not. I hid in the sewers.”
Here he drank some wine and let loose a small sigh.
“After the bombing I went back to where our house had been and there was nothing but ash. My mother had turned into a little black manikin one meter long. We scraped her off the cellar wall with pieces of a smashed toilet. And then the war was over and we learned the full story of our shame, and so we were not allowed to voice the suffering we had experienced. This destruction, this slaughter of children, these thousands of rapes we endured could not be acknowledged. It was our just recompense, our nemesis. And so most of my generation picked ourselves up and went on with life and rebuilt our country.”
He paused and I said, “What does that have to do with-”
He held up his fork. “Wait, be patient, I will get to that. So we all participated in rebuilding the country, but there were scars that could never be mentioned. Some of us never recovered from the disillusion, this massive betrayal, this nursery of lies in which we were raised. We were forever cut off from our fellow citizens, because any idea of a shared culture, our heimat, had been poisoned. The Nazis were very clever: they understood that to create a great evil you must pervert a great good, and this was our love of nation and family and culture.
“And when I asked my father what he had done in the war, he answered me honestly, and when I heard of it, I was not shocked, I did not reject him, because I knew in my heart I was no better than him, and I did not join the self-righteous of my generation, the ones who supposed they would have behaved so much more nobly than their parents in the same situation. So I became the person I am today. After my art studies were complete, I went to Switzerland and forged provenances and sold the paintings of the dead Jews without a single qualm. I said to myself that I was returning beauty to the world. Perhaps a self-serving lie, but, as I have suggested already, who does not tell themselves such lies? Yet the beauty is real, perhaps the only real thing there is. It does not save us, but it is better, I think, for there to be beauty than not. You have created a thing of great beauty, deep beauty, a thing that will last for as long as there are men to see it, and they will love it the more if they think it came from the hand of Diego Velázquez. This is foolishness, of course-the thing is the thing-yet who shall blame us if we profit from this foolishness? What legitimate business does not?”