He looked at it for a moment, sighed, and said, “That Liesl! Honestly, she has been told a hundred times to attend to the burn bags before she does anything else.”
He gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Wilmot. Tell me, what do you think you have there?”
I said, “I have there a Photoshop printout of an unfinished fake painting I last saw in a loft I was supposedly living in on Greenwich Street in New York. I was so rattled that I didn’t look at it closely enough, or I would have seen it was a huge ink-jet image printed onto canvas, then artfully gone over with a brush, and then glazed. I assume the images in that phony gallery were made in the same way.”
He didn’t say anything, just sat there with an amused look on his face.
I said, “The gallery, and the loft, and changing my door and my locks, and that ringer in Bosco’s place. And you got to Lotte too. It’s…I don’t know what to call it-insane? And how did you know the drug would affect me in that way? I mean the Velázquez connection. You couldn’t have planned it.”
He said nothing.
“No, of course not,” I continued. “It was just taking advantage of a preexisting fact. I was hallucinating Velázquez, and those paintings I did proved I had the skill. So of course, you had to forge a Velázquez.”
“Go on. This is fascinating.”
“And you implanted that slow-release thing in me so I’d keep having the experience even after I wasn’t getting the drug from Shelly.”
“It could certainly have been done that way, yes. Low-level American health care personnel are shockingly ill paid. It could have been done in that mental hospital in New York.”
“Zubkoff was in on it too.”
“I think you will find him perfectly innocent. If such a series of events actually transpired, then Mark Slade would have had to have been the instigator of the whole New York endeavor. You should be more careful about your confidantes in future.”
“But why? Why did you go through all that incredible trouble and expense?”
“Well, if I were to humor you in this conjecture,” he said, “I would have to say it was because of what happened to Jackie Moreau.”
The name came as a shock. “He’s dead,” I said inanely.
“Yes. Murdered. He did a very nice Pissarro for us, and a Monet. And he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. I tried to protect him, but I was overruled. So I was not going to take a chance with you. Because in something like this, as I have tried to explain to you, the forger always talks in the end, forgers can’t help it. And the people who deal in forgeries at this level understand that. But no one listens to a madman. I believe your madness has saved your life.”
“And you thought driving me crazy was the solution? Why in hell didn’t you come to me like a man and tell me the straight story and ask me to pretend to be crazy?”
He shook his head. “Assuming for a moment that you are right, no such imposture would have worked. You are an artist, not an actor. Do you imagine that the gentleman who asked you to draw him that day in Madrid would be taken in for a moment by an imposture? No, you had to be genuinely mad, mad before witnesses, certified mad by doctors of unimpeachable reputation. And mad you must remain for all your days, if you want to live.”
“That was why that guy was talking to Schick in the hospital,” I said. “He was checking up that I was really around the bend.”
He shrugged. “If you like.”
“So you’re agreeing I’m not a succesful gallery painter and that I did paint that fake Velázquez?”
“I’m not agreeing to anything of the sort. Wait here a moment and I’ll show you something.”
He got up and left me staring at his empty chair. After a short while he returned, holding what looked like a leather-bound photo album. He handed it to me and I opened it. Every right-hand page held a color photograph of a painting affixed to the thick black paper with old-fashioned corner mounts, and on each facing page was pasted a typed provenance, in German. There were twenty-eight in alclass="underline" several Rembrandts, a Vermeer, two Franz Hals, and the rest good-quality Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, with two exceptions. One was a Breughel of a skating party on a canal, and the other was the van der Goes altarpiece I’d seen in Krebs’s office that time. Besides that, all of them were unfamiliar to me.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“Well, you’ll recall the story I told you of the van that was consumed in Dresden. These were the paintings in that van.”
“Except for the van der Goes.”
“Yes, that had been removed and placed in the other van for reasons now obscure. But these paintings in the album are assuredly gone. Now, you may have noticed during your tour of this house a small door in the cellar that is always locked. Behind it is a bricked-up well. It was bricked up in 1948. Now, suppose I wished to remove the bricks for some reason and hired a respectable firm of builders to do the job, and suppose that behind the bricks we found all these paintings. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
It took me a few seconds to get it, and it was so absurd that I had to laugh. “You want me to forge twenty-seven paintings.”
He laughed too. “Yes. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
“But you’d never be able to sell them. The Schloss family and the international authorities-”
He waved his hand. “No, no, not a public sale. I’ve explained this to you. There is an immense private market for high-value paintings. To dispose of these would be quite easy, once news of the discovery was made available to a particular subset of the market. People have been wondering about the lost Schloss paintings since the war, and of course it is known that my father had access to them. They would sell like pancakes.”
“That’s an interesting offer,” I said.
“Isn’t it? And of course it would more than fund your own work and any expenses you might have in connection with your son’s treatment.”
“Yes, that,” I said, and thought of Lotte and my old pal Mark, and how they’d both contributed to the plot. I said, “I’m curious. How did you rope Mark and Lotte into this thing?”
“Speaking hypothetically, you mean?”
“If it makes you happy.”
“Then it was money, of course. Mark will realize a colossal commission from the Velázquez. And he does not seem to like you very much. He was quite gleeful to be, as he put it, fucking with your head.”
“And Lotte. Doesn’t she like me either?”
“On the contrary, she loves you very much. She agreed to help us so as to blast you forever out of your ridiculous and miserable existence as a commercial artist and also to obtain adequate medical care for your son, which you were never going to be able to do. There is no deeper love than this, you know, than to surrender the loved one so that he can become what he was meant to be.”
“I was meant to be an insane forger?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, Wilmot. Yes, you are insane, as planned. I mean to say, you imagine you are Diego Velázquez! What could be more clear evidence of madness than that? It is textbook diagnosis. You have long fits of amnesia during which you believe you have painted old masters. And so forth.”
For a long moment I stared at him, literally gaping. It was like a movie, a bad melodrama in which the villain explains to the helpless James Bond how he’s going to blow up the city. But Krebs wasn’t looking villainous at all, no malicious glee, just a concerned and paternal expression like Dad has when he breaks it to little Virginia that there’s no Santa.
There was no juice of outrage in me. I managed to say, “That’s pretty fucking arrogant, Krebs, to do that to someone, don’t you think?”
“Well, yes, I am an arrogant bastard. It is my nature and of course our national vice as well. But consider, Wilmot, that you have always been crazy, and with no help from me. When we started this you were a neurotically constricted artist incapable of doing decent work and slaving for workman’s wages producing shit for advertising or whatever. For an artist of your capability, that is the true insanity. Now, on the other hand, you have money and freedom to do what you like.”